Vista - Helping You Recover Your Work in Office 2010

My name is Nitie and I work in the Office Reliability Team. My team's goal is to improve Office reliability and your experience using our software. When thinking about how we can improve Office, we usually aim to make the product do exactly what you ask it to do, but in this case I want to highlight a new feature where we are doing something automatically in order to help protect you from accidentally losing your work. Have you ever closed Word after making a bunch of changes, and then accidently clicked ‘No' when asked if you want to save your changes? Then you suddenly realized what you have done, only to find that there was no way to recover your work? You are not alone. In fact, so many people were in similar situations that we improved Office 2010 so you can get that document back! We call this feature Versions and I would like to spend a little time introducing it to you.

How do we protect you from accidently not saving a document?

In prior versions of Office we periodically save your document in the background when you are editing a document. We keep this file around so we can use it to recover your work if the application crashes.

For Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Office 2010 improves on this idea. In the Backstage view we expose the periodic autosaved files from your current editing session and allow you to compare or restore them as the newest document. We purge them when you save and close your editing session.



Additionally, if you close an editing session without saving, we now keep your last autosaved file and let you access it from the Backstage view, under Recent Documents, or from Document Information when you open your document again. So now you can recover that unsaved work with a few simple clicks.



To ensure that we don't clutter your computer with these autosaved files, we only keep these files for 4 days, or until the next time you edit your document.

Now you can enjoy Office 2010 Excel, PowerPoint and Word with the knowledge that the software is working to protect you from losing your work.