Nothing is more frustrating than working on a document for hours and then have something happen that causes the Microsoft word to freeze or crash. Then the document is gone and all that work is lost…total bummer.

There are several ways you can lose a word document such as documents can be lost if word quits unexpectedly, there is a power failure, you close the document without saving it first or your 3 year old pushes the power button on your computer.

If word freezes, you will need to close it before you can do anything else.

Closing Word when it Freezes

Even though the application has crashed and stopped responding it may still be visible on the screen. The operating system sees this as still being open even though it knows the application is not responding. In fact, windows may even tell word is not responding. To recover your documents, you must first close this crashed instance of word. The easiest way to do that is by using the Task Manager:

• Press CTRL+ALT+DEL. The task manager will open
• Select the Processes tab, select any instance of Winword.exe, and then click End Process. If more than one instance of word is running, end them all.
• Close the Windows Task Manager
• Re-start Word

Microsoft Word AutoRecovery

The next thing you should do is to make sure that word is automatically backing up your work. Click on Tools -> Options and the window below will open. Select the Save tab as shown below. Make sure the Save AutoRecovery info every: is checked and a number is typed in the dialog box. I use 10 minutes because if you make the time period shorter, the application runs too slowly. But if you make it much longer, you will lose way too much work. 10 minutes is a happy medium.

Finding Word Documents that you lost

Frequently we know that we saved the document but don’t remember exactly where we put it. You know how that happens…you click on the disk icon without bothering to see where the document is actually being stored. Here are some steps you can use to locate that lost document.

• Click Start -> Search, and then For Files or Folders.
• In the Search for files or folders named box, type the file name or as much of it as you remember
• In the Look in box click My Computer which will search the entire computer or the specific hard drive if you have an idea where it might be located
• Select Search Now.
• If the Search Results box does not show the file, do the following steps
• In the Search for files or folders named box type *.doc which will search for all documents with the .doc extension
• Click Search Now.

If that does not find the file continue on to the next steps. The next place we will look is the recycle bin. When a file is deleted, Microsoft windows does not immediately erase the file from the hard drive. Instead it moves the file to the recycle bin by changing the location pointer of the file in the file index table.

Searching the Recycle Bin

Using windows explorer, go to the recycle bin as shown below

• Open the Recycle Bin.
• On the View menu, click Details.
• Also on the View menu, click Arrange Icons and click by Deletde Date to sort them by date which should make it easier to find the missing file.
• When you find the document that you are looking for, right-click on it, and click Restore. Windows will put the document back in its original location.

You can now use word to open the file and examine its contents. If that didn’t work, try the next steps.

Search for AutoRecovery Files

If you have auto recovery turned on, you can search for the backup file. If Word finds the AutoRecover file, the Document Recovery task pane opens on the left side of the screen, and the missing document is listed as document name [Original] or as document name [Recovered]. There may also be multiple copies backed up at different times.

• Double-click the file in the Document Recovery pane so it opens up in the main document window
• Click Save As and give it a name
• Save the document as a .doc file.