Protect your work, because crashes happen, the power goes out, or you sometimes just close a file without saving it! Make sure the AutoRecover and AutoSave options are turned on.

Go to Options > Save and make sure the “Save AutoRecover information every x minutes” box is selected, and that the “Keep the last autorecovered version if I close without saving box” is also selected.

You can have even more protection than this. Go to Options > Advanced > Save and select the box “Always create backup copy”. Backup copies are created in the same location with the original document, but with the prefix “Backup of” added and a different extension. If you work with long and heave documents, you may like also to select the option “Allow background saves”, which lets you work while Word saves you document.

Note that you can press Ctrl+S often in order to save your document manually, for example, after you finish a long sentence or paragraph.

After an Office program unexpectedly closes and is opened again, use the Document Recovery task pane to recover your files.