Recovering overwritten Excel file???

[LawyerRon]

How do you recover an Excel file when you’ve accidentally overwritten it? A friend called me today and told me that she had an important Excel spreadsheet already opened, minimized it, forgot she had it open, then opened it “again” from the “file” menu, after which she got this message: “Do you want to revert to the saved file”? She doesn’t quite now what she did but I think she “yes”. Now she has a blank spreadsheet instead of her rather extensive one. How do you get the original back? I have Ontrack’s Easy Recovery if that’s any help.


BTW, her OS is XP Home, and she has one of the latest versions of MS Office, (maybe Office XP but I’m not sure)

[LawyerRon]

Might the restore feature in XP work?

[glc]

Probably not, I think system restore only takes care of system files.

[Chris in U.K.]

Hi Ron,

I've just been trying to re-create this fault on my home system (XP pro and Office XP (although the 'about' says it is xl 2002) and I can't make it do it.

I've tried doing all kinds of combinations of open/close/save/not save/re-open/minimise etc, and without actually rebooting the machine with the app. running the worst I can make it do is to lose unsaved changes when I re-open an open file.

There is an auto-recover option (tools/options/save) but I think this only works in the event of a crash. This seems to replace the old auto-save option which I always have turned on at work in W98/office 2000.

Files saved by this method should be in C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel

At this time, please pardon me for making some very obvious points, but I do use XL a lot....

Thorough search for file in Win Explorer - manually and using find tool

Was your friend looking at the right part of the 'blank' sheet? - also check title bar

Select all in the blank sheet (hit the square in the top L corner, between A and 1) and check that the text colour is set to black

Unhide in window menu

Can't think of anything else at the moment, HTH,

Chris

[LawyerRon]

Thanks for the help Chris, I'm not sure how she accomplished it but she now has a blank spreadsheet with the same file name. I'll take your suggestions and look further.

[mikeL]

Hey Ron,

this file recovery software may help you out.

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

Good luck, HTH

[Chris in U.K.]

Ron,

Thinking about it again, if she has the right filename in the title bar but a blank sheet, and it isn't a view or display issue, it must be either a bug in the system or a careless 'save as' operation, unless (final insulting suggestion) she is looking at the wrong sheet in the right book?

Chris.