Thanks so far...

How would I find a hidden or temporary file? I've looked at the properties of the documents with which she is working and none of them have .bak and there is no ~$ anywhere to be seen.

I've tried the find > file thingy and found some "temporary" files I didn't know I had but nothing related to anything recent.

I also thought that if I could find the "temporary file" I might recover some of her work, but now I've tried shutting the computer down and still, if I open up a new document to work on, and then pull up an older document, the older document merely replaces the new one. I cannot have both open at the same time.

yikes. There's just the slightest outside chance that I'm gonna lose my temper.