Microsoft® Excel® 2010 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 2010 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 are open at the time the problem occurs, before bad things happen to them when the program crashes and burns.

Understanding AutoRecover

Over the years, Excel has greatly improved its ability to recover lost work after a crash. By default, all unsaved workbooks are backed up automatically every 10 minutes, ...