I just lost four hours of work when Word 2007 12.0.6015.5000 died. Last time that happened that badly was when I was working on my dissertation in 1996. It not only killed the open file, but all of the open word files. No autorecover. Custom bullets then bam. Save early save often. My wife's compact flash card is off to data recovery, too. Must have been that horseshoe that was pointed down. You might think Microsoft would tell me if my autorecovers are failing to save? Open the pod bay door HAL. Anyway, I didn't have this problem with 2003. Ugh.

Office 2007 is the devil. Excel doesn't do basic math correctly and the rest of the crap crashes almost as often as some of the original versions.

Rand

I have had similar things happen. That is why, when I am writing an important doc, that I do versions. I save one version, increment the file name by a numerical value, and keep going. I have found before that even if I can recover the open file, there is something inside of it that makes it where it crashes word continually and cutting and pasting to a new doc does not help.

Versions are the only way, with saves at least once every couple of days, to guarantee that your files are not munged beyond recovery.

I've thrown my 2007 disk pack into the attic it's terrible. I've moved all my word processing to Word 2004 for Mac.

For some strange reason, the Mac business unit manages to keep the committees out and pushes out excellent, reliable code with threadbare staffing. Perhaps they should have been put in charge of Vista also.

Best solution:
1. Throw out the Microsoft Vista OS and get XP Pro or, if feeling more daring, Linux.
2. ???
3. Profit.

Switch to LaTeX. It's free, it doesn't eat files (uses post-processing of plain text files, like troff etc) and it makes beautiful documents as compared with Word. The downside is that it has a shallower learning curve, so it takes a while to get good at it. Nonetheless, I teach undergraduates to use it in spacecraft design class every year, and I make all my graduate students use it.

Miktex.org is a good source for downloading, and then two good free/shareware editors are TeXnicCenter and WinEdt.

YMMV.

I am forced to share with the rest of the world. Save early save often. I got spoiled by the autorecover limiting my losses to 10 minutes. But for once, I spent a whole 4 hour stretch before emailing my file to someone. And that was synchronous with my last save. I'll see if Office SP1 is any better.

I know as much as Rand about redundancy and if it isn't saved twice it isn't saved at all, etc. It's just annoying when I get caught.

That was Sam's post, not mine, Dennis. When I use Word, I still use Office 97. I've never found a compelling reason to upgrade. I usually use Open Office 2.2.

Save early, save often, and save in successively-named files:
document01.doc
document02.doc
...
documentnn.doc

I do this even in reliable editors simply because I myself make stupid mistakes that I don't seem to be able to recover from. No, I don't trust anybody's "undo" function, either, because it typically doesn't persist if the document is closed then reopened.

This protects me even if I do something like decide a whole section is bad, delete it, then discover that I've thrown away something important.

Uh, I see I'm echoing Dennis. Sorry, missed your post first time through.

go into the c:\documents and settings\\local settings\temp directory to look for temp files that were last modified at the date and time that you were approximately working on your file. Maybe you have some of your data hidden away in a temp buffer somewhere.

Just tell notepad to open file of .tmp extension and see if you can recover your text from there.

Of course, if your real daring then you can try to use the debug command to browse for and recover truncated file names.

I didn't have this problem with 2003.

My wife is hoping against hope her office never mandates an upgrade to Office 2007. Or Vista.

I'd throw Media Player 11 onto that list too, if it were relevant to her work, but since I maintain the list that applies to our home...

Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft Corporation as a whole needs to hit the Revert button, go back about five years, and start over?