Thanks. I tried that. My colleague's computer had just crashed before she sent me the file. Could her computer somehow have saved the file in some funky format and then I inadvertently saved this error everytime I saved on my end? It really seems to have disappeared. I am near tears.
Open word.
in Word 2003:
Select the file menu. Right above the "Exit" Item there is a list of recent items. The top item in that list will be the most recently used.
In word 2007:
The recent documents are listed when you click the "office button" (or whatever it is called) in the upper left corner of the application.
As I said, I looked everywhere for it. I wish it were somewhere as obvious as 'recent documents.' Besides, with MS 7, there is no specific 'recent documents' like with earlier versions. There is just 'documents' to click on.
Windows 7 is unrelated to word. Although I did omit the posessive apostrophe, when I said "words recent document list" I meant that the documents list was part of word- not windows.
Another option (using win7) could be to use the start->Search and type "recent documents" One of the items that pops up should be labelled "Recent Documents", which may list what you are after.
Can you help for real? This is serious.
I'm sorry? What does this mean? What I stated before you didn't follow and essentially dismissed offhand as "already tried" so suddenly I'm not "helping for real" come on now, I know that working on something for hours and then discovering it may be lost forever is somewhat jarring (try working on something for 3 years only to have it and it's backups destroyed by a number of coincidences, not pleasant either let me tell you).
Despite your concerns, chances are, the file does exist on your disk somewhere; you can't save a file to nothing. If you downloaded a file from an attachment it will generally be saved somewhere in your documents folder, or, if you are using a browser based mail, to your temporary internet files with a randomly generated name. Outlook (or IE, or Firefox- whichever program you are using) then discovers the program used to open the file (say, for word, DOC or DOCX) and says "hey, word, open this file, it's called jdkfskdlfs.docx in the temp folder!" and word opens it. Now, when you save the file, it saves to that temp folder with the semi-random name.
Note the following: If you have run a disk cleanup in the meantime, the file may be deleted (as it resides in the temp folder). It might only delete .tmp files though, I'm not sure.
