Hi,

I was wondering if anyone might be able to help me here. I have spent about 2 hours working on a document using office word. The file is actually on the server. Luckily i saved some along the way. But there are a lot more that i haven't saved since then. I can't afford to lose them. I know i should've saved it more often. For now, i'm leaving it there (not responding) until i found a way to save my work before killing it. I have plugged out the network cable hoping that it would prompt me for network connection.

Strange thing is that i can still use the machine to do other work. It's just the word document that's NOT responding. What should i do now?

Any ideas?

Thank you in advanceQuote from: associates on May 20, 2007, 11:45:50 PM

For now, i'm leaving it there (not responding) until i found a way to save my work before killing it.It's just the word document that's NOT responding. What should i do now?

Office Gone Wild? You May Not Have Lost That File After All

"I was just about to save my report in Word when we got that power spike."

Like Excel, Word provides an AutoRecover feature. Word has included this feature for longer than Excel has, meaning you can recover files from Word 6.x through Word 2003.

Word will place AutoRecover files in a computer’s temp directory. (If you don’t know where this is, the fastest method to find out is to open up Command Prompt and run the command SET TEMP.) AUTO-saved files have the extension .asd, should you ever have a need to search for them by extension. From Word 97 to Word 2003, the file name will be "AutoRecovery save of document name.asd". For Word 6.x and Word 7.x, it will be ~Wraxxxx.asd, where xxxx is a random number.

How to recover a lost file in Word 2007 or in Word 2003

Recovery of MS Office Files from Temp Files

Microsoft Office has extensive AutoSave and Auto Recovery options that allow you to rescue your work in the event that it is lost due to a power failure, system crash or plain human error. However many people don't know how to use these features or that they even exist.

Even if you don't have these features enabled, you can sometimes recover data from the various temporary files that are created by Office while you are working on the document.

Microsoft have changed the way AutoSave and Auto Recover works in different versions of Office. Therefore you may want to experiment before you rely on this information.

Finding the Temporary Files

When a NEW file is started a temporary file is created. This can be either in the windows temp directory, in "C:\ Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft". If the file is stored on a network drive then it will be temporarily created there.

This temporary file will have a few different letters after the tilde (or squiggly line “ ~”) . These are good ones to look for to find some lost info:

Word

If you are looking for files used by word, then the FOLLOWING file types should be searched for, where "xxxx" is a number.

* A word document file will look like ~wrdxxxx.tmp
* A temp document file will look like ~wrfxxxx.tmp
* An auto recovery file will look like ~wraxxxx.tmp
* An auto recovery file that is complete will have the extension of .wbk.

The default auto save time for word documents is 10 minutes. You can control this time in Options under the "Save" tab. The auto save files are PLACED in one of the following two locations, which is where you should look to recover the data.

1. "C:\ Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Word".
2. "C:\ Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp"

When you have found a file that looks like it might contain data, you may want to open it in notepad instead of trying to get Word to reassemble it. The easiest way to do this is to open Notepad from the start menu then drag and drop the file in to it. The file will then be opened so that you can view the contents.

If the document was open when the system failed (power failure or crash) then you could try just opening Word again (not the document, just Word itself from the start menu). Word will then try to recover the lost document.