Stop Losing Work to Microsoft Word

One of the worst feelings, when you work day in and day out on a computer, is losing a few hours of work you spent writing in a document. More often than not, the culprit is yourself, and then the enabler, Microsoft Word. In this blog, we’ll review the preventative measures and gotchas so that you never have to lose work to Microsoft Word again.

Best Practices

First off, do yourself a favour and be intentional about saving documents when you start with them. This means when you start writing something new, save it to the place where the document should go or where you know you’ll be able to find it. This goes for documents you get in an email too, if you open them and start working on them, save them immediately.

Second, familiarize yourself with Word’s save options. In Word, click File -> Options -> Save . The first section has some important settings, such as how often your document autosaves, where recovery files are located, if there happen to be some, and where you save by default.

The first item in Word’s save options, if you have a recent version, is the AutoSave to OneDrive feature. This is annoying if you don’t have OneDrive, but that should be a hint. Get OneDrive if you don’t have it. Combine intentionality of saving documents and OneDrive, and there is no reason you should ever lose your work. When you save a document to OneDrive it autosaves as you go, giving you multiple versions of your document in real-time.

Things to Watch Out For

If you receive documents in a .zip file in Windows, and then open a Word document without extracting it, you can work in that document and save it, but it will not be saved back to the .zip file. Again, be intentional. Either extract all the files from .zip archive and then work on your document; or better, open the document in question and save it to your own file system before working on it.

The AutoSave to OneDrive is amazing, but it has one gotcha. If you open a regular document in OneDrive as a reference or template, and then you start working on it, Word will start saving your work to that document. The name will be the same, but the content and date will be changed. If I say, “be intentional” will that sound like a broken record? Save that document with a new name before you start working on it. If the document truly is a template, use the Save As function to save the document as a Word Template (*.dotx). When you open a .dotx document it automatically starts a new document for you.

The bottom line is this, if you go into every Word document with intention and save your document before you start your work, you’ll be less likely to loose your work.