need help recovering lost excel work

[under_water]

Hello,

I have been working on some files in excel for several days, saving regularly, etc. but have run into a huge problem. I was marking cells with a background color to help me organize and track my work, but the files being saved were .csv's.

From my research, it seems that .csv's only save data, not formatting such as cell background colors.

However, while I was working on the files, they displayed the colors correctly etc.

I am hoping that there is some sort of temporary file created by excel that would allow me to re-open my work and have the coloring appear so I can save the work as an .xlsx file with formatting.

Can someone please detail Excel's creation and use of temporary files and where the typical locations on my machine for those files would be?

Desperate...

[alansidman]

Here's a couple of links that may be helpful

http://office-recovery.com/excel.asp

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814068

You could try a google search if these are not adequate.