Thursday, April 9, 2009

Backing Up Your Work with Autosave in Office 2007

I was helping a college student a few days ago with a resume on which she'd spent several hours working. As Murphy's Law would have it, there was a total power flicker, only for a few seconds, but she lost all that work and had to start from scratch.

A great way of avoiding this kind of headache is to take advantage of the "autosave" feature in Microsoft Office 2007. With autosave you can configure Office to automatically save your projects as you create and edit them, without any extra effort from you.

From your document window, look to the top left corner of your screen, and you'll find the Microsoft Office button. Click once and you'll get a drop down menu. At the bottom right of your menu you will see a rectangular button labeled WORD OPTIONS.

Clicking WORD OPTIONS will open the word options window. In the menu on the left of the window click SAVE, this opens up a menu allowing you to configure all save options for Office 2007.

Near the top of the window you will see a checkbox with "Save Auto Recover Information" and a number box to the right. For example, if you enter a "5" into the number box, Office will automatically save your document every 5 minutes. So every five minutes, Office will save any changes or additions to your document automatically at that point.

Just below the Save Auto Recover Information line, you will see AUTO RECOVER FILE LOCATION. This location is where Office will auto save your files and where you would find your files should your computer crash, Office freeze up, or you accidentally close your document without saving.

You will see that the default "Auto Recover File Location" is located on a folder on the "C" or main hard drive. You can choose any folder, or create your own folder for the auto save location, or you may want to click the BROWSE button to the right to save to an external hard drive or usb drive, just in case a serious error on your hard drive occurs.

--kb

No comments: