Microsoft Office Word 2003 is a great program—when it works. By now, you’ll probably have discovered that Word (and Windows) do not always work as they should. Murphy’s Law states that Word will blow up or Windows will crash just as you’re finishing up that key document that has taken four hours… and that you’ve forgotten to save. Oops!

If something like that happens, Word may be able to recover your document. First, you should make sure that the Auto-Recover feature is turned on. (If it’s not on when Word crashes, your document will probably be lost.)

You can find the Auto-Recover option by clicking the Tools menu, clicking Options, and then clicking the Save tab. In the sample on the right, you can see where you can turn Auto-Recover on in the Save tab. You can also tell Word how often you want it to save Auto-Recover info by typing a number in the text box. (In the sample, the number is set to one, so it will save Auto-Recover info every one minute.)

Once you have Auto-Recover information set, if Word or Windows crashes, you will see this task pane when you re-open Word:

This task pane should list all the files you had open when Word crashed, and the various versions of those files. In the sample above, our first file is one saved with Auto-Recover at 1:39, while the second one was the last one the user saved at 1:19.

You can right-click on any file in this list to view your options, like the sample below.

This menu gives you options to open the file, save it, or delete it. You can leave the task pane open while you view the different versions of your file until you determine which one you want to keep.

You may also see this pane if Word detects errors in your file while opening it. If this is the case, you can right-click on the repaired file and click Show Repairs.

If you try to close the recovered file without having saved it, you will get this prompt:

You will then have the same options: to save or delete the recovered file, or to cancel out of the dialog and return to the document.