You guys won't believe what just happened to me.

I had been working on a new project with MS Word for the past 2 hours. I typed the letters "S" and "n" before hitting "enter". Or so I thought.

Turns out instead of shift-s, I pressed clt-s by mistake. You guys can imagine what happened next.

So there goes 2 hours of hard work.

I have a headache. Sigh.

--meclone2--

wait, doesn't ctrl-s save the doccument?

in any case, word saves periodically by itself. word files are huge because the program saves the version history. whatever happened, you should be able to revert to an earlier version of the doccument.

Paul

It was a brand new Word document, and its name was Document1. That was why.

Ah well, I'm retyping it from scratch now. :p

--meclone2--

I don't know what wondeful Word program you use, Paul, but mine definitely doesn't save anything by itself periodically. My Word files are also pretty small (15 pages- 105kb). But then I don't know what I'm comparing it with . It does, however, automatically ask me if I want to save or not if I try to turn it off without saving any changes.

Happened to me once though, when I was sure I had my article done and saved and it turned out I haven't saved it (or something).

And ctrl-s, at least on my PC, does save the document.

Julie

meclone2,

In your version of MS Word, doesn't Ctrl-S shortcut to "Save as..."? If so, do a search in your computer for a file called "n". If you are using the English version, if you typed Ctrl-S, n and Enter, then you saved the file as "n", and most probably in the "My Documents" folder. What is your version of Windows?


If you are using another language version, then I'm not sure. I used to use an older version of MS Word in Portuguese, and the shortcuts were different.

What is your version?

malu

I use the English Microsoft Office. The "Save As" window didn't pop up. I got the window that appears upon exiting (Do you wish to save Document1?) although my fingers were nowhere near Alt-F4.

Ah well, I am working on the re-type. That file is already in electronic oblivion. This is going to become one of life's unsolved mysteries.

--meclone2--

But did you check to see if there was a file named "n.doc" or something like that, on your computer, using Search? Maybe it's still there.

If not, good luck on your retyping. I hope you finish it on time.

malu

Julie, all WORD programs have the facility to autosave at intervals you dictate. WORD will periodically save the file in the background without you ever knowing about it. It won't prompt you or anything, it'll just merrily get on with it behind the scenes as you work.

I'd be surprised if this facility had been lost on WORD updates, so have a hunt around and see if you can find it on your pop up menus.

On my version of WORD, it's under Tools/Options/Save. Then I check 'allow background saves' and 'save autorecover info every' and choose the time from the box beside that one to suit.

Thanks to this, and having it set to autosave at one minute intervals, I haven't lost more than a few lines of a document in years.


LabRat

Hmm, I never knew about it. And mine was actually on! To save every 10 minutes. I reset it to every one minute. Thank you for this enlightning lesson, although now I am wondering what happened to that article I wrote and thought I lost because I forgot to save.

Julie :p