Have you ever worked hard on a report in Word, only to lose everything with a system crash? Well, don’t give up quite yet. Here are a few ways you may be able to salvage your lost data.

1. Open and Repair – Next time you open up Word, select the file in the Open dialog box, then click on Open and Repair from the drop-down list in the bottom-right corner.
2. Save the file in a different format – sometimes, converting the file to RTF or TXT will cause some of Word’s code to be stripped from the document, which could fix the problem.
3. Try opening the document from another computer – if this works, the problem is with your computer, not the file itself.
4. Check your e-mail – if you sent the document to someone else, you should be able to recover that copy by searching through the Sent folder.
5. Run CHKDSK – this will help you figure out the real source of the problem, and fix it if the issue is at the file system level. Simply click on the Start button and type CHKDSK into the search bar.

If all else fails, you may just have to fork over the cash for a data recovery program.