Save Your Work and Save Yourself!

I ran across this plea while browsing around some message boards:

MS Word Disaster! A friend of mine was up all night working on a paper in MS Word. She hadn't saved the document. Some how she managed to click "cancel" rather than "save" when she closed the document. If the auto recovery was running is it possible to find one of those files and where would they be? This was the third night she'd been working.

If you've never felt the anguish of losing an important paper after toiling away for days, you're one of the lucky ones. But you can rest assured that your luck won't last.

There are a few simple steps you can take to avoid a disaster and possibly save your academic standing come crunch time. First of all—and I know you've heard it before—get into the habit of saving work as you type. It's simple. Just hit the "Save" icon as you go.

But what if your computer crashes? You can take care of that, as well. Just set up your computer to back up your work as you go.

Here's how:

1. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Save tab.
2. Select the Save AutoRecover info every check box.
3. In the minutes box, specify how often you want your Microsoft Office program to save files.

For more information, see Recovering Lost Documents.

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