MS Excel for Mac destroyed my file

I created a 3 sheet workbook in MS Excel for Mac and had been working on it for several days.

When I last tried to save it the dreaded spinning wheel appeared and the program froze. I left it for some time but nothing happened so I used Force Quit. When I reopened the file I found it had only 1 blank sheet and the tab name changed to the file name.

I have a 2009 MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard and MS Office for Mac 2008 and the MS applications have been running slowly recently.

To make matters worse I have no backup as I had been travelling and the portable drive I use for Time Machine had also gone belly up.

Is there anyone with a similar problem, or who knows the possible cause?

Nope, not me. Does it open other Excel files?

It's likely you lost your work. To prevent that from happening again, open the Office preferences and select "always make a backup". Also, set your auto backup to a short interval, around 10 minutes.

chscag said:

It's likely you lost your work. To prevent that from happening again, open the Office preferences and select "always make a backup". Also, set your auto backup to a short interval, around 10 minutes.

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I sure did lose the file. Auto backup is set at 5 minutes and I'd been working on the file for much longer than that - and saved whilst I was working - but there is no auto recovery file.

This was a serious failure which just destroyed the file. Fortunately I'm at home now, with double backup (Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner on separate HDD's).

toMACsh said:

Nope, not me. Does it open other Excel files?

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Yes, Excel does open all other files but it is sluggish. I will probably upgrade to MS Office for Mac 2011 and hope for the best.