Recovery of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office documents
Very often people write to me and ask how they might recover an unsaved Microsoft Word file. Invariably the reason behind their request is an accidental failure to save a file before closing it. Most of these people are surprised to learn that Microsoft Office products such as Word and Excel have a built in auto-save function that creates a copy of their work automatically. A difficulty arises in that the default on auto-save is set for every ten minutes so it is still possible to lose data.
An even worse problem is that when you close a file of “new work” without saving it at some point the work is no longer automatically saved. It is then marked by Windows as a deleted file. But this is blessing in disguise as the best grade Windows recovery software sees this deleted file and can restore it. Remember that a program for Microsoft Office file recovery must list in its specifications the ability to locate all Microsoft Office file types.