lost document in Word, trying to copy and paste online

  • Thread starter Thread starter Karen Ferrier
  • Start date Start date
K

Karen Ferrier

I am new do not know how this works. Do you email me? I
am having so much trouble. I lost my resume last night,
it vanished as I copied it.

Please help. Where do I find answer?
 
It depends greatly on what you did, but if you highlighted your text, and
right-clicked on it---you will notice that "cut" is right above "copy." Many
a person has regretfully meant to copy text when their mouse jumped, or
their finger slipped just a little...and they cut instead.

One of my personal "rules" when working with documents is that if it is
important enough that I would be upset if I lost it, I MUST save it in more
than one place: a floppy, a CD-RW, a network drive, or some other medium
other than My Documents. You can tell word to automatically create a backup
copy of documents if you want, and even specify where you want them to save.
Another helpful feature is allowing background saves, which happen
automatically as you're working with your document.
All of these options are in tools-->options-->save

You also want to try Edit-->Undo any time something strange happens to your
text. You cannot begin to imagine the number of times I've done something
silly to my documents and an undo saved me retyping everything! Another
thing that can help is, if you've been saving every few minutes, is to close
the document without saving and then opening it right back up. It will have
everything up until the last time you saved, far better than starting all
over again!

Perspective check: Imagine it's your Doctorial Dissertation and you didn't
have any backup copies and it vanished...
 
Just to correct a few misconceptions:

1. "You can tell word to automatically create a backup copy of documents if
you want, and even specify where you want them to save." The first part is
true, but the "backup" is a copy of the last-saved version, not an extra
copy of the current version. That is, every time you save the document, Word
also saves the previous version in case you want to revert to it. These
files are named "Backup of <filename>.wbk" and are always saved in the same
folder with the document. You cannot choose where to save these backups. You
can choose the path for AutoRecovery backups, but these are also not true
backups; they are deleted when you close the document and come into play
only if Word hangs.

2. "Another helpful feature is allowing background saves, which happen
automatically as you're working with your document." AutoRecovery backups
*are* made automatically while you work with your document, but "background
saves" just means that when you press Save, Word allows the save to take
place in the background so that you can continue working and don't have to
twiddle your thumbs till Word finishes saving (not that this takes more than
an instant in most cases, anyway).

There is *no* feature in Word that will save for you. Your only hope is to
save early and often. Any document that you intend to save at all should be
saved within the first five minutes after you create it and at least every
fifteen minutes thereafter. A good rule is to press Ctrl+S every time you
pause for thought or to catch your breath--and certainly before you do
anything remotely risky.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
the 1,000,000,000th misunderstanding I've made this year. Thanks for
clearing it up Suzanne.
 
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