Good Word habits - save save save!

Forgot to save your Word document? You could try my article on this subject, but read the following advice first, and be prepared for the worst...

A habit I strongly recommend you get into is VERY regular saving of your Word document. I don't mean every hour, or once a day, I mean every other sentence!

What? That's a bit over the top, isn't it? Well, all I can say is that it is a LONG time since I lost anything more than a few sentences of a Word document, and I am happy to keep it that way! Ever lost a few hours' (or more) work because you forgot to save? You know what a downer that can be!

Sure, Word has an Autosave/Autorecover feature, which is supposed to bail you out, but for some reason it seems always to let you down just when you need it most! It's probably wise to make sure YOU are saving your document on a VERY frequent basis.

So how do we make sure we are saving our Word Documents regularly? My advice is get to know the keyboard shortcut CTRL+S very well! As soon as you create a New Document (using CTRL+N, of course!), even before you type ANYTHING in, press CTRL+S! You will be prompted for a filename and you can save your document immediately, before you run off 20 pages and forget to save it at all. Yes, it is quite OK to save an empty document, nothing bad will happen!

Now, this is the bit you need to turn into a habit: press CTRL+S as often as you can while typing your document in! Like I say, I do it practically after every sentence, and after a while it becomes second nature, to the extent you don't realise you are doing it anymore! This will ensure a very recent version of your document is always saved, and will drastically decrease the chances of your losing a large amount of work! It only takes a second for Word to save, it will not interfere with your work, and the CTRL+S shortcut is, again, much much quicker than using the mouse and clicking the toolbar button or (heaven forbid!) the Save option from the File menu.

Happy saving!

DISCLAIMER: Look, I can't PROMISE this will absolutely protect you from losing a document, so please do not rely solely on this method. You need to take all possible precautions, it's your responsibility to save regularly, and make regular backups, and you cannot later blame me, or say "Word did it by itself"! OK?! Also, a reminder of my article Forgot to save my Word document, which might help in a pinch.