Saving Your Worksheets So You Can Find Them

Nothing is as frustrating as knowing that you've saved a workbook file only to discover later that you haven't the foggiest idea where on your great big humongous hard disk you saved it. Excel tries to guard against this type of aggravation by automatically saving every new workbook in the My Documents folder. Many times, however, saving all the different types of workbooks you create in the same generic My Documents folder on your local disk just isn't practical. This is especially true in a network environment where spreadsheets are not normally saved locally.

This technique concentrates on ways you can minimize the annoyance of not knowing where you saved a new workbook file. These include changing the default folder from the generic My Documents to a more specific folder and setting up the Save command so that you're automatically prompted to fill in summary information on the new workbook file. Although the latter procedure does not itself guard against saving a new workbook in the wrong folder, it does help you more quickly and easily find the file if you forget where you saved it.

The final procedure in this technique covers the use of the AutoRecover feature to guard against losing unsaved data if Excel becomes unresponsive and needs to be shut down or your computer experiences a sudden shutdown that prevents you from manually saving your edits. By setting AutoRecover to a comfortable interval, you can be assured of losing as few worksheet edits as possible in such an event. You can also set the folder location where Excel saves your recovered workbook.