Save First

     Have you ever started a project, and then halfway through it, you get the dreaded message, "This program has encountered an unexpected error and must be shut down."  When you click "OK," the program closes, and all the work is gone?

     There are a couple of ways around that, but the easiest thing to get in the habit of doing is to "Save As" as soon as you start a Word Document, an Excel Spreadsheet, a Powerpoint Presentation or a Publisher Creation.  You don't have to do this with an Access Database, because the program forces you to save it first before you can design the database and enter the data (what would be REALLY simple is if ALL Mircosoft programs acted this way - maybe things will be different with Office Live. We can only hope.).

     When you save the file before you start working on it, you can set your project to "auto-save" by clicking "Tools" > "Options" > "Save" > then checkbox "Save AutoRecover Info."  You can then set how ofter you'd like your computer to automatically save your work.  You can also checkbox to always create a backup copy of your document.  If you're working with large files, though, this will eat up your storage space twice as fast, since a copy of everything you do will be stored.  Deleting the file you create also does not delete your backup file if you select this option.

© Michael V. Ziemski, Instrumediatech, 2008 (Original Publication Date: 20080303)