Member Avatar for DavidB

Yesterday (October 25) I spent a few hours working on a Word document. When printed out, it is six pages long.
This morning (October 26) when I opened up the document to resume work on it, all my latest work was gone.
The document property indicates it was last modified October 21.
In fact, it looks like the work I did on October 22 is not there either.
I am anal about saving, usually hitting the Control-S key or Save button frequently as I work on something.

So I am wondering what the heck happened? Has anybody else encountered behaviour like this? I am using Word 2007 and it has worked fine for many years. Why the baffling behaviour now?

The only thing I have done to my computer between October 21 and today is download and install Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop. Would that have anything to do with it? Could this new software have somehow prevented Word from retaining edits to a document?

More importantly, is there a way to get that work back? I have a print-out of the October 25 draft, so I could always re-type it, but if I can get the draft back that would be easier. I did not print a copy of the October 22 version, so I will either have to re-do it by memory (not good) or somehow figure out a way to get it back.

This is really frustrating; I find writing well to be difficult and slow going in the first place. Now I have to deal with software that is not saving?!

Any help would be much appreciated.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Brown427
Member Avatar for rubberman

Installing VS Express should not have done anything to your document, unless it was in a directory that VSex thought it "owns" - unlikely. The question is whether or not your file really WAS saved when you (think you did) enter ^S to save the file. There may be backup files in the document's directory you can view to see if you still have access to your changes. If not, then you are SOL... :-(

P.S. Do try using Libre Office. It is free, open source, and very good - and can read/write MS Office files quite well. If you find a bug like this, reporting it will usually result in a quick fix, unlike reporting such a bug to MS which may result in a fix at some indeterminate time in the future.

Edited by rubberman
Member Avatar for BigPaw

You could check your recent documents list in your start menu, and after that check the 'recent' documents in Word.

Failing that you could search your C: drive for every document on it using the asterisk dot doc method and hope that chorus up something. Search using:

*.doc

Or, search on a phrase in that document and see what Windows finds.

Member Avatar for Brown427

Ensure that your version of Office is set up in the options to save your document automatically every 7 minutes or so (or more or less, depending on your preferences). This will save you much time in the future. Otherwise, try what BigPaw recommended. Sometimes the version name of the document you were saving is on your c drive with a tildy~ next to it. Best of luck!

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