Help! I need to recover a MS Word document.

[Christy B]

My poor dd spent an hour writing a paper in MS Word. I told her to be sure to save her work, and she hit the "x" -- when she was prompted to save the file she did click "yes". But we still can't find the file anywhere.

She is so upset now, she can't get her thoughts together to rewrite the paper.

Any suggestions? I'm sure it must be saved in a temp file somewhere, but I can't seem to get to it. I know the first few words of the paper, and I thought it would default to save it as a file with those words, but no luck searching that way, either.

Bless her heart, she's only nine and still learning . . . I sure would like to bail her out of this one, though.

[elbac]

Open up Word, just type some jibberish, and click the X, or save as, to save it. It "should" come up with the same folder that the previous document (in this case the one that's mia) was saved to.

ETA: Did you try searching for the file using date modified, rather then just file name?

[hornblower]

Have you tried using the File/Open/Recent Documents in MSWord? It should be there but it depends on your settings...... Again depending on your settings, Windows may be tracking it for you; click on the Start button & see if you have "recent documents" activated.

If these simple things don't work, check out this article. About a 1/3 of the way down it starts dealing with MS word. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160761.aspx

[Christy B]

Open up Word, just type some jibberish, and click the X, or save as, to save it. It "should" come up with the same folder that the previous document (in this case the one that's mia) was saved to.

ETA: Did you try searching for the file using date modified, rather then just file name?

Unfortunately, it didn't work! Guess it's just a lost cause. I appreciate your help!

[nmoira]

Go into File > Preferences (if a mac) or Tools > Options or File > Options or File > Preferences (depending on the version of Word) in Windows. You should find a preference for file locations. Look for Autorecover. Depending on the version, there may also be an option for temp files.

If it's not there, in options go to save and make sure Always create backup copy and save Autorecover every x minutes are on. Make sure fast saves are disabled (it may be difficult or impossible to reconstruct corrupted fast save files). The terminology might be slightly different depending on the version of Word.