Excel 2007 Replaced EVERYTHING in a spreadsheet and crashed

[lcramer53]

I'm sick over this!

While working on a cataloging project, I had place-holder question marks which I later decided to change to "No Title".

I performed a search and replace, using the "?" (without quotes) as the "search" and typed in "No Title" (without quotes) and ran the process. As it was running, it appeared to do EXACTLY what I intended for it to do. Suddenly, it kind of crashed. The background of the spreadsheet disappeared, and I could see through to my desktop and all of the other information changed to "No Title", I could still see the rows and columns over an invisible background.

Is there any way that I can find, restore, the file to the previous state? I am so angry that I did not make a backup file.

Any ideas?? Please??

Thanks,
L.

[abousetta]

Hello and welcome to the forum,

In Excel's find function, ? = single wildcard... in other words 'Everything'. What you were trying to do is ~? which means a question mark.

I don't know if you can recover your file, but if you can this may be possible with file recovery software. The first I would look in is if Excel saved a temp file. Button >> Recent >> Recover unsaved workbooks.

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

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/conten...xcel-2007.html

Hope this helps.

abousetta

[FDibbins]

Your profile says "home"? If you are at work and on a work network, maybe the network admin can recover the last saved version?

[lcramer53]

Thanks for both of your replies, nope, not on a network, and now, I sure won't forget about how '?' is used in a search. Tried the 'recent' recover thing too and no avail. Oh well, guess I just have to start rebuilding the whole thing.
Thanks again for your quick replies.
L.