Excel is one of the most important programs in Microsoft Office. It helps you organize your data such as financial information, monthly sales reports, or competitor's analysis. It is much more complex to recover Excel than to recover photo or Word documents if you accidently deleted, or formatted them, because Excel files are sensitive to data gaps and lose information. Therefore, before you become a victim of losing Excel files, I share some experiences with you to avoid data loss.
Backup. Backup your important data by burning copies of your Excel files on a DVD/CD, saving them to other external hard drive/USB flash drive/memory card or store them with online storage program with the "Cloud" technology like send them into your Email. And keep update at least every three day or five if possible. In this way, you can recover Excel with those copies at once even though you lost it.
AutoRecover. When you lost Excel files because you don't save them on time when unexpected computer crash happens. It is extremely easy to retrieve Excel files with the built-in safety mechanisms in Excel program. Restart your computer and open your Excel file. Click "Microsoft"->"Excel Options"->"Save". You will get the "AutoRecover file location" for your auto saved document. Open it, you can restore Excel to the last saved version (Most likely it is the last saved ten minutes before accident happens). Here I need to mind you that you had better set the automatic save every minute or two (Excel's default setting is ten minutes), the short time you set, the more cells you can recover.
