Saving Your Work Automatically

We've all done it. You're working along for several hours on a document, when suddenly the power goes out. Or you kick the reset button on your computer. Or your three-year-old pulls the power cord out of the wall. The list goes on, but the bottom line is that you lost the past couple hours of work. Many things spring to mind at a time like this. Most of them can't be printed in a nice, family-oriented newsletter. But hopefully you learned a lesson when this happened.

Word allows you to protect yourself by automatically saving your work for you. To set the automatic saving feature, follow these steps:

1. Display the Word Options dialog box. (In Word 2007 click the Office button and then click Word Options. In Word 2010 or a later version, display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
2. Click on Save at the left side of the dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Save options in the Word Options dialog box.

3. Click on the Save AutoRecover Information Every check box. The number 10 appears in the Minutes box.
4. Adjust the Minutes box to reflect how often you want Word to save your document. You can select values between 1 minute and 120 minutes.
5. Click on OK.

When designating an AutoSave frequency, you should probably not select a time under 10 minutes. More frequent saves can waste time and become counterproductive.

You should also note that AutoSave does not really save your file. What it does is save information that Word can use to try to recover your file if Word stops unexpectedly.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10175) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Saving Your Work Automatically.