HELP! MS Excel screwed me....

Factual Questions
1

I need help. Here is the scenario…

Friday I was working on my desktop pc at work in excel and saved to floppy disk. I took that disc and woked on my laptop pc for about 8hrs of work at home. I updated two excel files on the floppy, and deleted 4 .pdf files that were on the disk that I no longer needed. Today I came back to my desktop pc, inserted the disk, realised that I still had the excel file open from Friday and closed it. It asked if I wanted to save changes to which I clicked “no”. I then went to open the updated excel file from disk, and all of the files from Friday are now back on the disk, and my updated files are gone!. Also the 4 .pdf’s that I deleted from the disk are magically on the disk again, albeit all files are corrupted and cant be opened.

:smack: Q1: How did closing the old desktop file without saving changes overwrite what was there on the disk?

:smack: Q2: How do I retrieve my work that was lost? Can I find a temp file on the laptop (even though the file was saved only to floppy?)

2

WAG, try the disk on another pc. could it be a dirty drive or disk?

3

Did you hit F5 to refresh the view of the A: drive? Closing the window and opening a new one would work too.

Apologies if this is too basic a recommendation, but it would be very unusual for deleted files to sponteaneously reappear on a floppy.

4

Not too unusual. I’ve seen this happen before because the disk’s FAT is scrambled. It probably happened when you told Excel not to save the file with the disk in. It then attempted to put the old file back in place (without your changes). Your updated file was probably in different sectors on the floppy than Windows was expecting and it decided that your punishment would be to redo your work.

Your best bet would have been to close Excel on your work pc and not save the file without the disk in the drive.