- Getting Organized (and Staying That Way)
- Where Should You Keep Your Files?
- Creating New Files
- Naming Documents
- Using and Customizing Common Dialog Boxes
- Storing Extra Details About Your Documents
- Searching for Office Files
- Working with Multiple Files
- Setting Up Automatic Backup and Recovery Options
- Troubleshooting
- Extra Credit: Find Files Faster with Desktop Search Tools
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Setting Up Automatic Backup and Recovery Options
No roller coaster can compete with the sinking feeling you get when an Office program hangs, crashes, or simply disappears. With most programs, you can kiss your unsaved work goodbye. But Office 2003 comes with "air bags" designed to make crashes less frequent, to make them less devastating when they do occur, and to increase your chances of recovering a document when Office does crash. These are the important points to keep in mind:
If an Office application "hangs"—goes out to lunch and doesn’t come back—you should shut it down using the Office Application Recovery program. Click Start and open the All Programs menu; then click Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, and choose Microsoft Office Application Recovery. (Figure 3.10 shows this utility in action.) Avoid using Task Manager or the other Windows tools—Office is one of the few Windows programs that ships with tools specifically designed to dislodge a "hang."
When you restart an Office program that has crashed, chances are good that you’ll be presented with the Office Document Recovery task pane (see Figure 3.11). Documents that are listed as [Original] probably aren’t as up-to-date as those marked [Recovered]. Choose the version that you want to keep, click it, and then Close the Document Recovery task pane.
It might be worthwhile to save several [Recovered] documents and compare the versions to see which (if any) have worthwhile changes. To do so, click the down arrow to the right of the [Recovered] filename and choose Save As.
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Figure 3.10 If an Office program quits responding, try to use the Application Recovery utility to recover your work.
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Figure 3.11 Office’s Document Recovery task pane appears on the left side of the screen.
In some cases, the recovery procedure will actually repair damage to a file when reopening it. In this case, you can use the drop-down menu to open a dialog box that shows you which repairs were made.