I'm so frustrated tonight. I have spent over 3 hours rewriting a pattern for a tutorial here, drawing my own graphics in Paint, copying, pasting, reworking, measuring.....and then got a quick pop up window that MS Word had stopped working!!

And now I can't find the four pages I have worked on so hard!! I kept looking through all sorts of files, recycling, pictures, nothing.

This is a fairly new computer to me, with version MS Office 2000 Professional which is slightly different than what I've used before. Does anyone here know how to tell me to find that "lost" file???

Jan in VA

Did you save the file at all? If you did try to remember the name of it or even some identifying part of the name. Go to right click on the Window in the very left hand corner. Go to Explore. There you may be able to find it using the Search feature. Search in Documents, Good luck.

I'm not an expert, so hopefully someone else can expand on this sort of beginner stuff.

Check to see if your program was set up with an auto-default to auto-save every few minutes. Open Word, click on the multi-colored circle in the upper lefthand corner, at the bottom of that menu will be "word options". Click on that. On the lefthand column will be "save". Click on that and see if auto-recover is checked. If it is, it will tell you where auto-saved documents are kept. You can go int that file area and see if you can find your stuff.

If you saved it, MS Word would have asked you where to save it, normally they will go into your documents file. Try checking there. If you did not save, it may be lost in cyberspace. Good luck and I hope you find it.

If you saved the file (past file saved/doc.) your wizard will find it. If your wizard cannot locate it Then:

Open your MS Word file and read what you have stored and the time & date it was stored; or click on thumbnails and right click to open your files. You may have to do this manually if your wizard does not locate it.

If the "pop-up" deleted your file,..... maybe go to system restore OR check your trash bin/recycle and see if it's there.

I'm soo sorry! Good luck!

I would check .tmp files also.

go to search, look for files called *.* (this will show you everything), and add the paramters of being modified yesterday (or the day you worked on the file), this should show you everything that you modified yesterday, from there you just need to narrow down your results to target your file.

good luck, this is why I love MAC, I broke up with PCs at home a long time ago :-)

Jan, I’m sorry this happened. Did you save it? Have you been able to find it yet?. My computer has locked up and lost things too if it is any consolation to you. Do you have a flash drive?

Ouch! That's bad. And it may have lost it. I've learned the hard way to save often because just when it's almost done the computer freezes, especially something I've spend hours working on.

Oh Prism, THANK YOU!! This did the trick although I didn't get into "options" like you do....there is no "multi-colored circle" in mine, but "options" is there under "Tools."

I learned something new, LOL! Like I've learned everything I know on the computer....by trial and error. I have made changes so that things are backed up every 5 minutes.

Thanks to all of you who were up late (or early this morning) and tried to help and support me. I felt the care and concern!

Now back to working on that pattern for you all. :D

Jan in VA

Great! Glad you were able to figure it out!