The North Orange County Computer Club is helping The Gadgetress tackle the multitude of readers cries for help. NOCCC group has experts in all sorts of computer topics. The club, which meets monthly on various topics, has been in existence since 1976. Visit the club’s site at noccc.org.

Question: I work mostly on my Microsoft Word because I do a lot of writing. I have Windows XP. A week ago I had a 23,000 word manuscript that I had been working on for quite some disappear on me.

I was editing my work and I accidentally brushed the Ctrl key and the whole manuscript disappeared. I am not absolutely sure if it was that key or the Shift key I brushed. All I know is that it was simultaneous … gone.

My son, who is pretty good with computers, ran a search using some key names in the manuscript and to no avail.

Do you have any idea of how I can find the manuscript? It certainly wasn’t deleted so it must still be in the computer somewhere.

Answer: Chalk one up in the loss column. You have stumped the PC Club! We can think of no single action that would cause the results you describe.

There are several sequences to consider. The most likely series of missteps we can think of, based on “brushing” the Ctrl and/or Shift keys, follows. You depressed Ctrl and the “A” key — which is right next to the Shift key — simultaneously. This would have told the computer to select all 23,000 words, which might have taken a fraction of a second. An unnoticed reaction to seeing something go wrong may have been to hit the space bar. This would have converted all 23,000 words to a single space and your document would have appeared to be “gone” from the screen. At that point, going to the “Edit” menu and selecting “Undo Typing” (or pressing Ctrl+z) could have reversed this type of oops.

If you OK’d saving the document as you exited Word, the file should still be on the hard drive. But searching for key names in the document won’t return results from your file, since the manuscript now contains a single space character and nothing else.

Most people are familiar with some common keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+C=Copy, Ctrl+V=Paste etc.) one of which, Ctrl+A, you may have inadvertently used. In fact some of the newer keyboards are printing the common global control key shortcut names on the front of the keys. You may be surprised to learn that Word supports 204 keyboard short cuts. Check out Microsoft’s list of keyboard shortcuts.

SAVE EARLY, SAVE OFTEN

Way back in the CPM and DOS days, when PCs were less reliable, people would spend hours on a document in RAM memory and lose it all when the PC crashed. The phrase “Save early and save often” was coined in that era. Wordstar was one of the first word processors to implement a backup file feature. MS Word has both a timed auto-save feature and a backup file feature. They are accessed under the “Tools” menu. Click on the “Tools” item and then select the “Save” tab. (Click on the image at right to see larger version of the options window.)

Enable the backup feature by checking “Always create backup copy.” Now, when you save a document, Word will save a copy of the previous version. If this option was already enabled, the previous 23,000-word version of “Manuscript.doc” would have been saved as “Backup of Manuscript.wbk”. To open a backup file, go to the “File” menu and “Open”. Go to the directory where the original document was saved. From the “Files of type” menu, select “All files” to see the backup files.

In that same palette of options, place a check by “Save AutoRecovery info every” and set the time to your preference. AutoRecovery comes in handy if your computer crashes while you have a Word document open. The next time you open Word, it will automatically open the AutoRecovery file.

EASY DAILY BACKUP

Backup! Backup! Backup! Your whole disaster could have been only a minor irritant with the use of even the simplest of inexpensive backup schemes. Recent ads have offered 4GB USB 2.0 flash drives for under $30 and external USB 80GB hard disk drives for under $80. A simple Copy and Paste of the My Documents folder to an external USB drive at the end of the day and worst case, you lose one days work.

MORE SEARCH OPTIONS

Your son had the right idea, but it might help to double check that he used all of the extended search features in Windows Explorer:

1. From the “Start” menu, click “Search” and select “All files and folders”
2. Leave “All or part of the file name” blank
3. In “A word or phrase in the file,” type in your keyword
4. Under “Look in,” choose “Local Hard Drives”
5. Click on “When was it modified?” and make sure “Don’t remember” is selected
6. Click on “What size is it?” and again make sure “Don’t remember” is selected
7. Click on “More advanced options.” “Type of file” should be set to “All Files and Folders.” Place a check mark in front of “Search system folders,” “Search hidden files and folders” and “Search subfolders.”

This should eventually check every file on your computer and give you a list of files that contain your keyword. The more unique the keyword is, the shorter the list.

This Sunday, Mar. 2, IOGear will be presenting their latest computer accessories including their Digital Handwriting Scribe at the club’s 2PM Main Meeting. The public is invited and we would love to see there. Visit noccc.org/calendar for details.

~ Jim Sanders,VP NOCCC

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Stump the PC Club. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.