Microsoft® Office Excel 2003 Inside Out

Recovering from Crashes

In the past, "crash recovery" largely involved an initial flurry of expletives, followed by a brisk walk around the office and perhaps a couple of aspirin. Excel provides something beyond comfort and sympathy for digital mishaps—an actual mechanism that attempts to tuck away open files before the program comes screeching to a halt. And it works pretty well. If Excel encounters a problem, it attempts to save any files that were open at the time the problem occurred, before bad things happen to them when the program crashes and burns. When you restart Excel, these files are then listed in the Document Recovery task pane that appears on the left side of the screen, as shown in Figure 2-1. If the file listed in the Document ...