OFFICE 2007 (Word, Excel, PowerPOint) LOSING RECENT DOCUMENTS LIST

[jfguerra]

Help! All of a sudden, I am losing all the Recent Documents lists from Word,
Excel and PowerPoint in Office 2007. It happens when I shut down and reboot
(which I do every day). It doesn't do it while I have my laptop on. I can
use any of these apps, shut them down and bring them back up again and again
and the Recent Documents list will continue to show the dos I opened / used.
But once I shut down my machine, they are erased from the Recent Documents
list.
I have already checked the settings on each of the apps (e.g. Excel, Excel
Options, Advanced, Show this number of Recent Documents) and it's not set to
zero.
Any suggestions? Did some recent update from MS screw this up? Thanks for
any advice or guidance.

 

[Stefan Blom]

Are you running one of those utilities that automatically clears recent file
lists, the history, the Internet cache, and so forth? If so, that could be
culprit here.

 

[Pierre]

The same problem started over the weekend where I lost my recent document
list in Word and Excel from Office 2007.

My solution: In Word, click the Office button, click Word Options and click
Advanced. Scroll down to the Display section. Enter the number of recent
documents in the field.

In my case, the number 17 appeared in the "Show this number of Recent
Documents" field. I believe the problem is that Word could not display 17
recent documents so I changed the value to 5. I loaded and closed 5 separate
documents, existed and re-launched Word. My 5 documents appeared in the
Recent Documents. I shut down and rebooted my laptop, launched Word and
sure enough my 5 documents were listed in Recent Documents.

 

[Pierre]

Hello Stefan,

My problem of disappearing Recent Documents is back again or should I say
never left from Word 2007 (which I installed from Microsoft Office Enterprise
2007 CD).

In Word Options/Advanced/Display/Show this number of Recent Documents, the
number 17 appears. I changed the number to 5, clicked OK to save and close
the window. I edited 3 documents and saved them back to my HD and shut down
my laptop. A few hours later, I logged into my laptop and did a Windows
Update. I restarted my laptop, launched Word and no documents appeared in
the Recent Document column. I checked Recent Documents and the number 5
which I entered earlier was replaced with number 17.

Any ideas??? (where in the registry does the number you enter appear?)

 

[Stefan Blom]

17 is the number of recent documents specified by default for Word 2007
(earlier versions, as you may already know, supported a maximum of 9 recent
files). It seems as if the factory default settings are being restored on a
regular basis. It is, however, hard to tell *why* this is happening.

Is something else, beside the recent documents, affected?

 

[Pierre]

I checked Excel and PowerPoint and it looks like the same thing is happening
with these applications.

My Outlook is configured to "Empty the Deleted Items Folder upon
exiting" and I go into Internet Properties, click Delete - Preserve Favorites
website data, Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, History, Form data,
Passwords, InPrivate Filtering Data options are all selected. All these
settings were the same before this problem started.

 

[Stefan Blom]

Something is (obviously) doing this on your system. Did you install a new
application recently?

 

[Pierre]

I finally got around to checking my system in order to identify what has been
causing my recent Word documents to disappear from my system. I believe that
I found the problem.

I am using Trend Micro Internet Security - you can configure it to
"Automatically the records of programs selected above whenever Trend Micro
Internet Security starts". You can set the following options to be
"cleanned" when Trend Micro starts, i.e. Media Players, Microsoft Office (it
was enabled), Windows, Other Programs, Instant Messaging Programs and Web
Browsers. I disabled Microsoft Office option last night, rebooted my laptop
this morning and my recent documents are still there. Problem resolved (I
hope).

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Thanks for the feedback, Pierre. One more "protection" item to be aware of.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Pierre]

You must remember that enabling or disabling this feature will affect all MS
Office applications - in other words you can't disable feature for a specific
MS Office application and enable feature for others.