Bonnie has perhaps given an inadvertent clue to what may have happened to this particular victim. Using Ctl-S to save places that command immediately adjacent to Ctl-A, so a mis-stroke is quite easy. If this user was using Ctl-S to save the document frequently, as she indicated she was doing, inadvertently hitting Ctl-A instead of Ctl-S just ONCE, would produce the entire result seen.

Ctl-A selects the entire document, and the next keystroke replaces the entire document with the one character you typed - with normal Word setup. If you continue typing your document consists only of what you typed after the "select all" command. Since the "new" document was saved, it wrote over the last good copy, so the last good copy no longer existed on the computer. (If this actually is what happened.)

[Having had this happen once or twice when I was a Newby user of DOS Word - about a century ago - probably is the reason I prefer the Alt-F,S and Alt-F,A keyboard shortcuts; but that's a matter of preference and habit.]

There are any number of methods that one can use to minimize accidents, and sharing secrets can be quite helpful; but it remains necessary for each user to find what works best for them.

A key sequence that I use frequently enough in Word to have it quite well remembered:

Alt-E, E, ^p^#^#/^#^#/^#^#^#^#  ^#^#:^#^# ^?^M, Tab, ^p, Alt-A,Esc

- would probably be of absolutely no use to most people; but I've found it helpful at least a half-dozen times in the past month. I'd certainly avoid insisting that anyone learn to use it, since most people would just be confused; and hardly anyone needs to do what it does.

Changing filenames and making lots of redundant copies may be a worthwhile method for some, but for people who work on a lot of Word files, esp on many simultaneously, the method may just add more keystrokes and more places to make errors. It depends a lot on "personal style."

Word actually is a very reliable program, if used consistently. It's so reliable that I have a couple of files that I know will "break" almost every time I open/edit them, so I use "special care" with them. Those specific file-associated methods would pretty much prevent getting anything useful done if used everywhere though.

John