Protect your Office documents against lock ups

If there is one thing that is annoying, it is losing your work due to the software you are using no longer responding. To avoid this, the Microsoft Office suite provides an automatic save function which allows you to recover from the most recent version available in the event the software fails. By default, the interval between automatic saves is set to 10 minutes. If this is too long for you, and you wish to reduce it, here is how it can be done.

In Word or Excel for example, click on the file button at the top left and then on the "Options" button.

Next, click on "Save" in the options down the left hand side and find the section where you can change the automatic save interval. We changed this to 5 minutes, which cuts the potential working time lost in half, although you can set this to 1 minute if you really don’t want to lose anything. You then simply need to click on "Ok".

It should be noted that a similar function exists in the free OpenOffice.org suite.