When you are working on a Microsoft Excel workbook, you may suddenly be faced with a power outage and if you have not been saving your file regularly, you may end up losing a great deal of the changes that you have made. If you have enabled the AutoRecover option, you may be fortunate enough to not lose all the changes though some may be definitely lost. When you reopen the file, it is possible that the program will start at the point that you left it last and you can continue working on it. On the other hand, Excel might attempt to repair XLS file before opening it, in which case, the program might present to you three versions of the recovered document and you may have to choose which one you prefer to keep.

Microsoft Excel comes with powerful features that enable you to make sure that your data stays safe and your files can be recovered even in case of any mishaps. The Document Recovery Task Pane is one such powerful feature. When Microsoft Excel closes unexpectedly when you are in the middle of work, you might not be able to start the program at the same point where it crashed. When Excel becomes aware of this, it tries to repair XLS file and then presents to you a Document Recovery Task Pane that may contain anywhere from one to three recovered versions of the document that was closed unexpectedly. You can choose which one of these you would like to finally save and continue working on.

If you look at the Document Recovery Task Pane and browse through the files listed, you will see that you can either Open, Save As or Delete the file. If you click on the 'Open' option, you will be able to see the contents of the file and verify for yourself, which one contains all the latest changes that you had made in the file. Once you have decided which file you are going to retain, you can click on the 'Save As' option and give your workbook a different name so as to create a new version of your Excel document. You can use the 'Delete' option to get rid of the other two versions so that there is no cause for confusion.