Forum Discussion
Excel crashing and and losing hours/days of work
Hi All, I have a user who regularly uses MS Excel Home & Business 2016/2021 sheets that have months/days of data. Sometimes when they work on these Excel files, it crashes and it loses hours/...
In my experience, Excel crashes a lot less now than in earlier versions. My routine is to not rely on autosave, nor repaired files. I turn autosave off and decide by myself when to save, and I do it by pressing F12 (save as) and append a time stamp on the file name like "Routines_220305_075.xlsx" using YYMMDD_hhm to have them the sortable by name in chronogical order.
I omit the second minute figure and thus have a new name every tenth minute.
Also happens that I append a note about the files development eg
Routines_220305_080 table of contents sheet.xlsm
The purpose is that if I want to go back to a previous version and chose another development path, I can easier chose what file to continue from.
When testing different solutions, I always do it in the original file - not a test file since it will become the origin if the test works out fine and I do not want two original named files.
Finally, I put all the passed files in a folder named like "2bdeleted in May 2022".
The main issue, having Excel not to crash?
Sorry, I do not have the solution, but F12 (and Ctrl+12 to open in fewer steps) has been very useful to both me and my customers also in other applications when the software acts like crash generators.
I omit the second minute figure and thus have a new name every tenth minute.
Also happens that I append a note about the files development eg
Routines_220305_080 table of contents sheet.xlsm
The purpose is that if I want to go back to a previous version and chose another development path, I can easier chose what file to continue from.
When testing different solutions, I always do it in the original file - not a test file since it will become the origin if the test works out fine and I do not want two original named files.
Finally, I put all the passed files in a folder named like "2bdeleted in May 2022".
The main issue, having Excel not to crash?
Sorry, I do not have the solution, but F12 (and Ctrl+12 to open in fewer steps) has been very useful to both me and my customers also in other applications when the software acts like crash generators.
Thank you for your reply, it sounds like a fine system you've set up but I don't think my user will be satisfied with doing that. Hoping if there's a more concrete solution to this issue.