Office XP Basics

Recovering Lost Work in Office XP

Sometimes a Microsoft Office XP program will suddenly stop responding. If this happens to you, there are procedures you should follow to try to recover any lost work.

Recovering a program

If the program stops responding, recover the program:

Open the Start menu.
Choose All Programs Microsoft Office ToolsMicrosoft Office Application Recovery.
In the Application list, click the program or file that is not responding.

THEN

To try to recover the file, click Recover Application or Restart Application.
To close the program, click End Application. (You will lose your most recent changes.)
If you want to report the program to Microsoft, click Report problem. Otherwise, click Don't report problem.

THEN

Open the Office program.
Review the list of files in the Document Recovery task pane.

The Document Recovery task pane

The Document Recovery task pane helps you review, open, and save recovered files.

To review files in the Document Recovery task pane:

Point to the file, and click the arrow next to the file's name.
In the drop-down list, click Open.
Open each one, and save the best version.

To view what repairs were made to the file:

Point to the file, and click the arrow next to the file's name.
In the drop-down list, click Open.
In the drop-down list, click Show Repairs.

AutoRecover

By default, Office XP's AutoRecover feature automatically saves a temporary copy of your work every 10 minutes. However, you can set the AutoRecover to save your work more frequently.

This feature, while turned on by default, must be on in order for the Document Recovery task pane to work properly.

To reset AutoRecover:

Open the Office program.
Choose ToolsOptions from the menu bar.
The Options dialog box opens.
Click the Save tab.
Make sure the Save AutoRecover info every: box is checked.
Use the arrows to adjust how often AutoRecover saves a temporary copy of your file.
Click OK.

To learn more about recovering lost work in Office XP, check out our Office XP tutorial.