There is NOTHING worse than having worked on an Excel Spreadsheet or written something in MS Word and then had to redo it because of a power loss or application crash. You can avoid this frustration by following a few quick and easy precautionary steps.
So How Do I Protect from Microsoft Word and Excel Crashes?
The most critical piece of advice I can start with is to save early and often, especially before your print. I don’t know if it’s due to Murphy’s Law, or if there is some science behind the fact that programs tend to crash when the document is sent to print.
To protect yourself between saves, launch the Office application and follow this process:
- Click File.
- Click Options.
- Click Save on the menu bar.
- Make sure that “Save AutoRecover information every 10 minutes” is checked.
- Make sure that “Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving” is checked.
- Click OK.
Now you are protected! If the Microsoft application crashes or if you exit and say “Don’t Save” when it asks if you want to save, you will be prompted with a screen such as the following to recover the file at the last checkpoint!
I’ve shown you how to establish Autosave using Microsoft Word. You don’t need to set up autosave for each document, but you do need to set autosave up for each application. Configure autosave for each of your Microsoft programs, and you significantly reduce the amount of data loss that can occur.
Note: This article assumes you are using a Microsoft Application such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel and are saving data to a local hard drive or USB memory stick. If you are saving to a cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive, backup versions of the file (revisions) are automatically saved for you and can be recovered through that program’s interface.