Pistonheads please help - Urgent

[WorAl]

I have been working on an excel document for weeks and have come to the end.

Unfortunately I have made a huge mistake and excel wouldnt allow me to undo the command.

I need the document back to how it was yesterday, there has to be a way of doing this? shirly?

Can the pistonheads massive help with this matter, its litterally hours of work which is now redundant.

Cheers
Alan

[Acehood]

Sometimes you can recover previous versions of the file but it depends on how your Excel is set up (if/when it was saved previously..)

Unfortunately it will usually just overwrite the existing file leaving you a bit stuck.

[plasticpig]

What operating system are you using XP or Vista?

[HRG]

If Excel has saved a later version you *may* be able to recover the previous version with something like Restorer2000 from Bitmart. IIRC the demo version will actually recover files <64K in size.

[rpguk]

If you haven't saved it yet then use the 'save as' command and save the file as whatever-new.xls

When you open the original version of the file it'll be at the stage you last saved it at which may or may not be useful to you of course!

[Lost soul]

Close it but do not save changes , or is that to simle and i am wrong ?

[TheD]

Are you using it on a Domain with shadow copy?

[AndyAudi]

Can you tell us the mistake to see if there is a way of correcting it?

[Lost soul]

What about doing a system restore on yesterdays date

[HRG]

Lost soul said:

What about doing a system restore on yesterdays date

Won't help I'm afraid.

[plg101]

Can you describe the error - is it something that an excel guru might be able to fix in minutes? (there being so many ways to skin the cat)?

[becksW]

Hubby says recover from the back ups you should have made whilst working on it. Unfortunately if no back ups been done there may be no way out.

[4nonymous]

Need alot more detail.

Have you saved the file ?

What was the error?

[AndyAudi]

plg101 said:

Can you describe the error - is it something that an excel guru might be able to fix in minutes? (there being so many ways to skin the cat)?

That's what I was wondering, not too complicated but the amount of times I've just used "Find & Replace" to put things back to the way they were.

[plg101]

AndyAudi said:

plg101 said:

Can you describe the error - is it something that an excel guru might be able to fix in minutes? (there being so many ways to skin the cat)?

That's what I was wondering, not too complicated but the amount of times I've just used "Find & Replace" to put things back to the way they were.

Yup..

O/P.... we are all waiting to help!

[WorAl]

ok thank you people.

I have been compiling a list of people with businesses and addresses for my uncle.

there were several columns 'A' - Business Name, 'B' Name of person, 'C' - Address,'D' Area and it goes on.

I copied column 'A' and pasted over column 'C' instead of inserting a column. Unfortunately I did not realise this straight away and had done some other work on the document. Upon noticing what I have done, Excel didnt allow me to 'Undo' the command and I am now stuck with it. The document has been closed and I said not to save the changes but on re-opening the changes had been saved (so at some point I must have hit save before realising my mistake).

Now what has happened is I have overwriten the info in column 'C' but for some reason it has also mixed up the rows so the info for each person does not match.

I think the only way of getting this back is by restoring an older version of the document, I just don't know how to do this.

I am using Microsoft XP on Windows XP.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Edited by WorAl on Sunday 22 November 14:47

[plg101]

I think Excel stores some temp files in:

c:\documents and settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp

Or use the search tool to search for "whatever your filename is.*" which might find you an earlier version that you saved somewhere else.

Might get lucky with an older version being there, but few software programs back up older versions automatically to give you an archive - they rely on the user to save out various versions as they go I'm afraid.

Sorry, this doesn't sound hopeful....

[WorAl]

its not looking good, I cant find any backups and the search function has returned the only document I have.

[HRG]

:cough: restorer2000

[plg101]

HRG said:

:cough: restorer2000

Would that help? The file hasn't been lost or deleted, but (in the operating systems mind) correctly closed and saved. I guess you might be able to recover some of the old temp working files; but wouldn't normal system activity have recovered that drive space?