Ramble On

I had a client that about every six months would report that their current and very important financial Excel files would revert to versions days or months old. They insisted that they only had one copy of the file of the file server and none on their local machines. AutoRecovery in Office and specifically in Excel was the culprit. Heavy users of Excel would report this more often because they would open multiple instances of excel.exe and this would lead to strange behaviours and crashes which would then cause AutoRecovery to act strangely.

A couple of questions came to mind as I researched this. Why has it only affected Excel files and where is it pulling the old data from if there is only one copy of the Excel file on the server?

See the stories of all the people with the same issue below.

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Story 1.

http://www.computing.net/answers/windows-xp/excel-file-mysteriously-reverted/164766.html

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Story 2.

http://brettpeters.org/log/2003/04/15/argh.html

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Story 3.

http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Excel/microsoft.public.excel.misc/2008-02/msg01977.html

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Story 4.

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=228504&start=0

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Story 5.

Also, notice the issue of opening multiple instances of Excel. Not sure if you use Excel like this but opening more than one excel.exe instance causes trouble with the AutoRecovery feature in Excel. You can only safely open one instance of Excel. See here.

http://forums.techguy.org/business-applications/673281-excel-autorecover-issue-2003-a.html

"AutoRecover and multiple instances of Excel When more than one instance of Excel is running and one instance closes unexpectedly, a new instance of Excel is automatically started and the AutoRecover files are opened. If all instances of Excel close unexpectedly, but the computer is still running, a single instance of Excel is started and all AutoRecover files are opened. In the case of a power outage, all recovered files are opened when you start Excel again."

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Excel 2003: The Missing Manual

Read pages 46 - 48 on how AutoRecovery works and is enabled by default.

http://books.google.com/books?id=v2fi86XfKiwC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=%22it+looks+for+AutoRecover+backups%22&source=web&ots=TZhfUnrDeR&sig=mhc1lS9u_2x2f6BZVxG4PEQmjTQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result

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"Disable AutoRecovery In Excel

Excel automatically saves your work every few minutes. This is referred to as the Autorecovery feature and it is included in other Office applications. Autorecovery is designed to prevent loss of work from power outages, application errors, and so on but has proved very buggy especially in Excel. The AutoRecover option is annoying because you are unable to modify the spreadsheet while the file is being saved."

To disable the AutoRecover feature in Excel 2003:

1. Open Excel.
2. From the Tools menu, click Options
3. In the Options dialog box click the Save tab.
4. Under the Workbook Options, check the Disable AutoRecover option.
5. Click OK.