I recently bought a new laptop that came with Office 2003 standard trial
edition preinstalled.

I have been entering text data into a spreadsheet (just to use as a
reference list, no formulas) so the data can later be searched. I have been
saving changes daily (but of course no backups) and the next day I just
pickup where I left off. I have had no trouble for weeks, but today the
changes for about the last week are missing. Data from previous input is
still intact. Fonts, column widths, etc. are all intact. I could understand
if one day were missing, if I happened to click 'no' instead of 'yes' to save
changes, but not a full weeks data that was previously accessable.

I checked the timestamp of my xls file and it is showing accessed today
(12/18) but modified on 12/8. I have not made any software changed or had to
rollback to a restore point, so that can't be a problem. The trial time limit
isn't up until February, so it can't be office locking out changes. I did not
have excel recover a temporary file or overwrite the file through windows
explorer.

Questions:
1) Where did my data go? Obviously, because of the date stamp of the
file, excel overwrote the current file with an older one, but where did the
older file come from? And why did it not prompt me if it was opening a
timesaved or a backup?

2) Why did excel overwrite the file with an older one when I saved instead
of using the current data set I had open?

3) I have searched my drives both by file name and by a text string in the
file contents looking for a backup or timesaved copy, but haven't found one.
Any suggestions?

4) Completely off-topic, but the web interface sucks. What are the server
nntp, etc. for setting up this news server in Agent.

Robert Olsson