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Fortunately, modern versions of Microsoft Word contain features to minimize lost work when crashes happen.
#Word 2011 for mac keeps crashing save how to
How to recover a lost unsaved or corrupted Word document.When writing, nothing breaks Csikszentmihalyi-style flow more quickly or completely than losing work to a BSOD or unexpected power outage. The original document that you created is then deleted.ĭescription of how Word creates temporary files Therefore you could search your system for files of this name and then use the same "Drag and Drop" technique to view the data in Notepad to recover the data.Īnother interesting thing to note is that when a change is made to a document that requires a temp file to be created, when you press the save button all the temp files are merged together into one file and the file is renamed to what you called it. This is because when any info is copied it is sent to a temp file with the name ~wrlxxxx.tmp. If you have been working on a file for hours and the document was created via copying and pasting or at one point had cut the entire page or document to paste some place and then placed something else on the clip board, the data may not have been lost. These files can also be found in the following locations:Ĭ:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFilesĬ:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles Find your file and double click on it to open. In the bottom left corner is Recover Unsaved Documents.Click on File tab in the upper left corner.In Office 2010 and higher, you have an additional option, built in to the product, called Recover Unsaved Documents
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Word will then try to recover the lost document. 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). The file will then be opened so that you can view the contents. The easiest way to do this is to open Notepad from the start menu then drag and drop the file in to it. 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.
#Word 2011 for mac keeps crashing save windows 7
On Windows 7 and Vista, the locations will be "C:\ Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temp"."C:\ Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft\Word".The auto save files are placed in one of the following two locations, which is where you should look to recover the data. You can control this time in Options under the "Save" tab. The default auto save time for word documents is 10 minutes. There are others, but these are the ones most likely to contain data that can be recovered.įinding and using the temporary and auto save files
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These are good ones to look for to find some lost info.
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This temporary file will have a few different letters after the tilde (or squiggly line " ~ "). If the file is stored on a network drive then it will be temporarily created there. This can be either in the windows temp directory, in "C:\ Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft". When a new file is started a temporary file is created. Therefore you may want to experiment before you rely on this information. Microsoft have changed the way AutoSave and Auto Recover works in different versions of Office. However many people don't know how to use these features or that they even exist.Įven 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 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.
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