Some surprises are fun. Something that is NOT fun is working on a Word document for a while, then a sudden power outage shuts off your computer, and you realize you never saved that document. But there’s good news! You can probably get it back!

Actually this alarming situation might happen due to a brief loss of electricity, but sometimes it can happen just because of user error. You create this big document, then you go to close it, and in a brief lapse of focus you click on “Don’t Save”. So guess what – Word doesn’t save it. It’s just gone. Or rather, it APPEARS to be gone. There is still hope!

On this blog and on my podcast, I do complain a lot about Microsoft because of the way they do things. And it’s deserved. But in this case, Microsoft got it right. This feature has saved a lot of hours of work for MS Word users.

To show you how it works, I’ll go through the exact process of losing and recovering.

First, I’ll create a new Word document. I started it with one line: “This is my sample document” Then I just added 5000 words of Latin “filler text” that I copied and pasted from Lipsum.com (a great source if you ever need a bunch of dummy text for a document or a website).

This is a large document. Typically if a document is 5000 words, it means I’ve spent a lot of time creating it, and I definitely don’t want to do something stupid and lose it.

And speaking of stupid, even though I theoretically have spent so much time on this, I have never once clicked “Save” to save the document and give it a file name.

Now I’m going to click the X in the top right corner to exit this document and close the MS Word program. Of course I get the question, “Want to save your changes to Document1?” but I absent-mindedly click “Don’t Save”.

And of course, that’s when the panic would suddenly strike. Did I really just delete hours of work with a single click? Do I have to do it all over again?

When that happens, here’s what you do:

Click to open MS Word. Then look at your list of recent documents. At the bottom of that list, click on “Open Other Documents”.

On the next screen, you’ll see a list of your recent documents, and at the bottom of that list is a button that has inspired hope and relief in a lot of scared people. It says “Recover Unsaved Documents”:

And there it is – a new window opens, and displays my recent unsaved documents. If there are several listed there, you can identify the one you want by the date. In this case, I can also identify it by the name (Word just takes the first words in the document to create the file name):

So I select that document and click Open, and I have the file back on my screen so I can actually save it with the proper name and in the right location in the Documents folder. Disaster averted!

WARNING: Word does not save documents like this forever, so don’t wait! As soon as you realize what you’ve done, go through this process and save it the correct way so you’re sure you have it back.