Excel

[danbos]

Does anyone know if Excel automatically backs up files you're working on if you haven't ever saved it? I just did something totally stupid...I was working on a Thermodynamics project, getting data off the internet and copying it all into one huge spreadsheet and making graphs of it...it took a while and I'd rather not do it again. But me, not using that little guy up there in the upper room, never saved it, and when I got hungry, I left to go get some food and just closed my laptop to make it "go to sleep." Which would have been just fine, but when I came back, it wouldn't "wake up" so I just hit the power button and restarted. After I did that was when I remembered that I had a big giant spreadsheet that I hadn't saved, and then I hoped that it would automatically recover it when I opened Excel again like it does sometimes, but it didn't. Anyone have any clue if it does back up, and if so, where to find the file? I also looked all through my Temp files, but couldn't find it in there.

[TN3Dmom]

The more recent versions have it, but if yours is over a few years old, you may be outta luck. Every time mine has done that, when I open excel, I get a side bar on the left of the screen that says what files were recovered and you have the option of retrieving them. I'd say if excel opened and you did not get that then your data is lost. Maybe someone more tekkie than me knows how to get it back. I would recommend the autosave option. It saves your work every few minutes so you have a back up in case something like that happens again. Good luck. It's a bummer to lose all that time. Sorry.

[danbos]

I have Office 2000, so it is a few years old.

[danbos]

Alright, i guess it wasn't so important, it didn't take me too terribly long to redo it, because I kind of had a system working now, but it'd still be nice to know for the future if anyone knows anything about this.

[hochspeyer]

Access saves every time you go to a new record, Excel does not.

[Sam!]

There may be a temp file somewhere that contained the data, but it would be hard to identify. It likely would have started with a ~ and may have actually been deleted when you opened Excel after restarting, unfortunately. I believe that "recovery pane" was new with either 2000 or 2002 and has become more reliable since then, so it's definitely not something to rely on in 2000.