Lisa Du is director of ReadyTechGo, a service that helps people gain the confidence and skills to embrace modern technology.

Have you ever found yourself lost in a project on Microsoft Word? It could be an assignment, a novel, or even your own autobiography! What tends to happen when you get swept up in a project is that you forget to press SAVE. If you’ve spent hours writing something up on Microsoft Word, it is imperative that you save all your hard work. Otherwise, something truly tragic can happen: your computer freezes, and you lose it all!

But before you throw your arms up in despair and burst into tears (something I’ve found myself doing after a few times this has happened), there’s still hope yet...and that hope is called “Autosave”. Autosave is a function automatically available on the newest versions of Microsoft Suite, designed to rescue you from these dire times. It automatically saves your work in a temporary file on your computer, and it does this in regular time intervals (for example, every 10 minutes). 

All you need to do to recover your file, given that your computer or the program freezes and you haven’t pressed save in a while, is reopen Microsoft Word.

The program will show you a sidebar on the left side of the screen with a list of your autosaved documents. Simply click on the last autosaved version, and there you go! Your lost document will reappear on your screen. Save it immediately, just in case it happens again!

A good thing to think about is how often you’d like for the program to autosave your documents. Perhaps 10 minutes is too infrequent; perhaps you’d prefer to have it autosaved every five minutes. Well, that can easily be done.

On Windows

1. Open up Microsoft Word
2. Click on “File” at the top-left corner of your screen
3. Look for “Options” down the left-hand side of your screen and click on it
4. Look for “Save” down the left-hand side of the window that pops up and click on it
5. Make sure that the “Save AutoRecover information every x minutes” box is ticked. If not, give it a click
6. Where it says “Save AutoRecover information every x minutes”, change the “x” value in the drop-down menu. The default will say “10 minutes”, so if you click on this, a drop-down menu will appear and you can choose the most appropriate time for you
7. Make sure you click “OK” to save your changes.

On Mac

1. Open up Microsoft Word
2. Click on “Word” at the top-left corner of your screen
3. In the drop-down menu, click on “Preferences”
4. In the window the pops up, look for “Save” and click on it
5. Make sure that the “Save AutoRecover info every x minutes” box is ticked. If not, give it a click
6. Where it says “Save AutoRecover info every x minutes”, change the “x” value in the drop-down menu. The default will say “10 minutes”, so if you click on this, a drop-down menu will appear and you can choose the most appropriate time for you
7. Make sure you click “OK” to save your changes. 

For more information about ReadyTechGo, visit their website here.

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