the whole new computer thing is very contingent on me cleaning the apartment and finding a pile of money under the couch. It's a sometime-in-the-next-six-months plan, not gonna happen this week.

S'ok Jessica, it's always good to pull out the old geek suit and try it on for size.

t hides the now déclassé cape, tossing it in the corner.

I love that pile of money under the couch. I just sit on it and keep thinking about what I'm going to buy with it. It's like the time I discovered that about $3000 would buy me the top of the line laptop that was out at any given moment. That discovery made me so happy I thought I had the three grand. So long as I avoid looking under the couch, I won't be disappointed.

And as long as you don't buy the laptop, you have an extra $3000.

That's right! I'm rich!

Now I can plan my new robot. One that growls.

Robopuma?

Maybe just roboirritablegeek.

Also? FUUUUUCCCCK! You know how when you're working later at night than you should be on something that has a deadline of tomorrow that you should have been doing all today but you didn't because one of your students showed up clearly needing to talk but not wanting to say so so you took her out for coffee instead of working on the work and you bring up a document from a cd and make some edits and then you realize that you need to save the edits, but you can't save on the cdr, so you do a save as, and because you're tired you click on the title of another very important document that resides on your hard drive accidentally and thus save the first document as the second document, and ignore the 'are you sure' message that pops up because you know what the message is supposed to say, and thus you annihilate the second, very important, resides only on this hard drive in its current form, document?

Is there anything you can do about that? Get back an earlier form of the document that you overwrote by save as?

Because I'm an ass and an idiot and I just did that. Tell me there's an easy painless way, Buffistas.

Liese, what hardware, OS, and application? There may be hope in backup directories, temp directories, and drive salvage software, but the hivemind will have to know where to start looking.

Yup, sorry. Was panicking too much to give info. Running MS Excel 2003, on XP home, HP pavilion laptop.

Hmmm...I dunno. I guess the first thing to try is to look for the last back-up copy of the file.

That's all I got, sorry.

I'm a little out of my depth here, but I found:

[link]

Excel backups have the original name and the suffix .xlk (with a displayed filetype of “Microsoft Excel Backup File”), and will appear in the same folder as the original.