Recovering an earlier version of a file

[Carol W]

I use an Excel2003 file weekly to create a transmittal report which I call
'Transmittal Master'. The file has accumulated data on various attached
sheets. At the end of the week, I format the first sheet for that week,
delete the data sheets and rename the file for that week's transmittal.
Today, I made the changes, deleted the sheets but forgot to rename the file
when I saved it, losing a few years of accumulated data. Is there a way to
recover an earlier version of the Transmittal Data file before I made the
changes and saved it?

 

[Bernie Deitrick]

Carol,

Talk to your IT department and see if they have a backup on tape or disk somewhere. Otherwise, if
you haven't been creating dated backups by often "saving as" with a new file name, you're out out
luck.

You may be able to recreate the file by opening and copying data from the renamed files - there are
plenty of macros that are posted that will consolidate data tables from multiple files - you would
need to describe your folder and file structure and your naming convention to help customize the
macro, if you decide to do that.

BUT - The BIG moral of this story is that if you have a template file, you should save it as a
template file - under File / Save As... File type.. Template (*.xlt) That will store the file
with an extension of .xlt, and Excel will never save over the file unless you explicitly tell it to,
perhaps after you make changes that you want to keep with the template.

HTH,
Bernie
MS Excel MVP

 

[Carol W]

Thanks for your answer. I was afraid of that. Luckily, I have a 2007
version of the file that I can use and I only lost 6 weeks of data that was
added. I've learned my lesson....backup - backup - backup.....in various
places. Thanks again.