Tip of the day: Recover gracefully when an Office program crashes

If an Office XP or Office 2003 program (such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) stops responding to input, don’t panic. And don’t kill its entry in the Windows Task List. If you do that, you’ll lose any unsaved work. Instead, take a deep breath and use a well-hidden tool that even most experienced Office users don’t know about: the Application Recovery console.

Leave the stalled program running, click Start, and open the All Programs menu. Click Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, and finally Microsoft Office Application Recovery. This opens the Application Recovery console, which shows you all Office programs that are currently running.

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For Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other programs that you use to create and save individual documents, you’ll see the Recover Application button. When you click this button, you force the program to fail; the built-in recovery tools save any currently open files and then close the hung program, giving you the option to report the error to Microsoft. For programs such as OneNote and Outlook, which save data on the fly, this button isn’t available and you’re given the Restart Application option instead.

This feature can take most of the sting out of a sudden crash, especially when you use it in conjunction with the AutoRecover features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. AutoRecover saves a backup copy of your current document, worksheet, or presentation at intervals you specify (the default is every 10 minutes). To set AutoRecover options for one of these three programs, click Tools, Options and find its checkbox on the Save tab.