My oldest daughter emailed me with a Windows Vista/Excel 2007 problem: I am so frustrated, and maybe you can shed some light on this mystery. For the second time this week, a file that I had saved has disappeared. Today I downloaded results from Survey Monkey, opened them in excel, went to SAVE AS, renamed it and saved as an excel 97 -2003 file (which is compatible with SPSS), then re-coded all My oldest daughter emailed me with a Windows Vista/Excel 2007 problem: I am so frustrated, and maybe you can shed some light on this mystery. For the second time this week, a file that I had saved has disappeared. Today I downloaded results from Survey Monkey, opened them in excel, went to SAVE AS, renamed it and saved as an excel 97 -2003 file (which is compatible with SPSS), then re-coded all my data. I saved it again multiple times, as I am paranoid about losing work, and then closed it so that I could re-open it with SPSS. Except that it is no where to be found. I looked where I thought saved it, I looked in all my files, I went to recent items, I opened excel to look for it under those recent documents — i looked everywhere it could be. Nothing. 2 hrs of work, gone.My first reaction was this note: Don’t panic. By default, Office 2007 on Vista saves documents in a weird place, appdataroaming. Documents should show up in Recent Items from the Windows menu, however, no matter where they were saved. They should also show up if you use the search window at the bottom of the Windows menu, i.e. to search for “*.xls”. They may not show up by default from Excel if you saved them in XLS format, but they will show up if you change the file type that Excel is seeking to All Excel Documents.Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite enough to turn up the missing file. On the other hand, she tried to replicate what she’d done to download, open and save the original file, and saw the file she wanted hiding in a temp directory, but couldn’t find a way to open it. Of course! If she downloaded the original file and opened it directly rather than save it and open it in a separate step, it would be placed in a temp directory, and if she didn’t change directories when she saved as XLS, that would also be in a temp directory. Windows Vista, in its infinite wisdom, does not index temp directories, so their contents will not show up in a normal search. We did finally find the file by going to Search Results in Everywhere, enabling Advanced Search, checking “include non-indexed, hidden, and system files (might be slow)”, and looking for “*.xls”. It didn’t take that long, and she was then able to open the file and save it in her Documents directory. Software Development