The North Orange County Computer Club is helping The Gadgetress tackle the multitude of readers cries for help. NOCCC group has experts in all sorts of computer topics. The club, which meets monthly on various topics, has been in existence since 1976. Visit the club’s site at noccc.org.
Question: I work mostly on my Microsoft Word because I do a lot of writing. I have Windows XP. A week ago I had a 23,000 word manuscript that I had been working on for quite some disappear on me.
I was editing my work and I accidentally brushed the Ctrl key and the whole manuscript disappeared. I am not absolutely sure if it was that key or the Shift key I brushed. All I know is that it was simultaneous … gone.
My son, who is pretty good with computers, ran a search using some key names in the manuscript and to no avail.
Do you have any idea of how I can find the manuscript? It certainly wasn’t deleted so it must still be in the computer somewhere.
Answer: Chalk one up in the loss column. You have stumped the PC Club! We can think of no single action that would cause the results you describe.
There are several sequences to consider. The most likely series of missteps we can think of, based on “brushing” the Ctrl and/or Shift keys, follows. You depressed Ctrl and the “A” key — which is right next to the Shift key — simultaneously. This would have told the computer to select all 23,000 words, which might have taken a fraction of a second. An unnoticed reaction to seeing something go wrong may have been to hit the space bar. This would have converted all 23,000 words to a single space and your document would have appeared to be “gone” from the screen. At that point, going to the “Edit” menu and selecting “Undo Typing” (or pressing Ctrl+z) could have reversed this type of oops.
If you OK’d saving the document as you exited Word, the file should still be on the hard drive. But searching for key names in the document won’t return results from your file, since the manuscript now contains a single space character and nothing else.
