The last thing i need is to be working on a paper for 6 hours and have it crash and lose all my work. Is there any way to avoid this?
Looks like others have already answered your other questions.
Please allow me to address this. The method that I am going to describe, while a bit tedious, has saved my bacon and others on numerous occasions on both Win Office and Mac Office.
Note, this is for large projects. For example (just a rule of thumb):
A. PowerPoint presentations with over 50 slides, or fewer slides with complex slides, embedded graphics, pics, etc. If you do use pics in your slides, JPEG them to a low level to save space and help PowerPoint. Most projectors are 1024x768 these days so more resolution is a waste.
B. Word documents that are 25 pages or more. Or smaller documents with many embedded charts, graphs, pictures or other objects.
C. All Excel spreadsheets that have formulas.
Again, this is being very conservative, probably anal as some would say, but when you are working on a large project with a deadline, and something goes wrong, you will be happy that you did this.
Here is what I do. Say I have a project that is called, "MyProject" and it is a PowerPoint presentation.
First I create a folder called, "MyProject."
Then I create a new file and save it with the the date and a letter after the name like so.
MyProject - 20080706a.ppt
After a while, usually when I make many changes, I change the name to the next letter like so:
MyProject - 20080706b.ppt
And so on throughout the day.
The following day, the first thing that I do is open the last version I was working on, and save it as:
MyProject - 20080707a.ppt
I use this pattern until I am done. Once done, if all works well, I save the file as:
MyProject - Final.ppt
or use the presentation date such as if it was presented on the 12th:
MyProject - 20080712.ppt
I then delete the old files. But not until I am completely done. The reason for this, is sometimes there is a corruption in the file that is carried forward. If you don't keep your backups, you cannot go back to the version where the corruption did not exist. One time, we went back a few days until we found a good copy. This was using Word 2002.
One of the funniest PowerPoint corruption that I ever saw, was on a presentation that had about 100 slides. All of a sudden, the slides reduced themselves to thumbnail images (flush to the upper left of the slide) upon the slide they were on. Only the thumbnail and solid color background showed. If you went to the thumbnail view, you could see the slides with their little thumbnails. There was nothing we could do to recover that file.
We restarted everything and opened the last saved version and continued from there. Luckily we had a fairly recent backup so it was easy to recover and move on.
