Excel 2010 disappearing Spreadsheets

Hi, my name is Kathy Hawk. I'm new here and very grateful this forum exists. I'm a writer and marketing professional in high tech. Until recently, I've gotten through a career of four decades without creating spreadsheets. More knowledgable people set them up for me for program planning, project management, and budgeting. However, in starting a new online publication in partnership with a total Luddite (a 30-year technology journalist who writes her articles in Hotmail letters and has never used any program in Microsoft Office), I had finally to learn enough Excel to set up a contact database spreadsheet for our newsletters and marketing. We set up a form for her to populate it, so it would be as easy as possible. And she's been transcribing her contacts (you don't even want to know how she's kept track of them up to now) into Excel.

Yesterday she called in a panic. She had entered more than 200 contacts and when she opened the spreadsheet to work on it again, there was nothing there. Not the headers I'd put in or the contact info she'd input. And yes, I checked to see if she was looking at a different sheet. It was the right sheet, but completely empty.

I spent the afternoon looking for a solution. Though I didn't find anything about disappearing data specifically related to 2010, there were forum posts about earlier versions. So, working over the phone with her, we tried some of thoe tips to make the data reappear -- with no luck.

The thing is, the file info suggests the data is still there. The empty spreadsheet I created for her was about 11 KB. And her current file is currently 61 KB.

I had her email it to me, so I could fiddle with it. But so far I can't make it reappear.

Any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated.

Kathy

She di'nt save it? Or just before saving the entire sheet might have got selected and delete buttton pressed by mistake!

Click on File

Under the recent places in the bottom click on recover unsaved workbooks. Select from the files available. You may get lucky if a previous version is available

Thanks for responding.

There are no hidden rows or columns. And I checked the "unhide" button, but it wasn't selectable.

I checked the font color, and that's not it.

She was working on Worksheet 1, but I checked the other two just in case. Maybe the data is hidden, but I don't know how to find it if so.

She did save. The data entry form requires a "save" to exit it. And then I instructed her to either save through the File menu, or if she exited through the "X" icon to agree to save all changes to the worksheet.

The really strange thing is that I set her up for autosave every four minutes. And there is nothing autosaved either. And I tried to restore previous versions, but there are no previous versions. (But it's been opened and closed several times since she ran into the problem.

The final piece of weirdness was today when I had the file open and got a message from the "Trust Center" that I had no license for the file, and it was shut down.

I built this file on my computer. I emailed it to her, and now I am working on the same file which was emailed back to me. Her computer has Office 2010 from my license. (I had a three computer license and I was only using two of them.)

That's all I know right now.

Kathy