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Changing the AutoRecover Settings
If you’re not comfortable with the ten-minute 25
AutoRecover save interval, you can shorten or
lengthen it. For some users, this interval is too long
because they would never want to have to reenter
ten minutes worth of data. For others, it’s too short
because it seems like Excel’s always interrupting
their work by saving their data changes. To modify
the AutoRecover settings, follow these steps:

1. Choose Tools➪Options to open the Options dia-
log box.
2. Select the Save tab to display the AutoRecover
settings for the program, as shown in Figure 4-5.

• Figure 4-4: Setting up Excel to automatically display the
Summary tab of the Options dialog box when
you first save a file.

Changing the AutoRecover

Settings

The AutoRecover feature is turned on when you
install Excel so that every ten minutes the program
automatically saves any editing changes made since
the workbook was last saved. The program saves all
the edits you’ve made since the last AutoRecover
save in a special document-recovery backup file
• Figure 4-5: Access the Save tab of the Options dialog
located in the folder designated as the AutoRecover box to modify the program’s AutoRecover
save location. Then if your computer experiences settings.
some sort of power failure or Excel unexpectedly
goes comatose on you (a very rare occurrence but 3. To modify the AutoRecover save interval, enter
not completely unheard of) before you can save the the new time value (between 1 and 120) in the
workbook yourself, you can open this recovery Minutes text box or use the spinner buttons to
backup file and use it instead of the original file. select it.
4. To select a new folder into which to save recov-
AutoRecover doesn’t operate on a new work-
book that you’ve never manually saved with ery backup files, select the AutoRecover Save
File➪Save, so be sure to save your new work- Location text box and then enter the pathname
book before you enter a bunch of formulas for this new folder.
and data in it, or you could end up losing Normally, you don’t have to worry about this
it all.
folder location because the Document Recovery
task pane (discussed later in this section) finds