Excel Tip: Automatic Backup of Key Excel Workbooks

Posted by AccountingWEB on Apr 25 2012 5836 printer friendly

Excel expert David Ringstrom is sharing his tips for optimizing the way you use Excel in our new Excel Tips series.

By David Ringstrom, CPA

From within the Save As dialog box of Excel, click the Tools menu, and then choose General Options.

Click the checkbox to Always Create Backup to have Excel automatically create an .xlk version of your file. For instance, if you save the workbook as Participant Hours Tracking.xlsx, each time you save the file Excel will create or overwrite a second workbook named Backup of Participant Hours Tracking.xlk.

The backup copy is only as old as the last time that you saved, so if you compulsively save every five minutes, your backup will always be five minutes old, but it does offer a bit of a safety net.

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