I'm trying to help a friend remotely that had an excel file that he uses and saves daily. He tells me yesterday that his laptop froze up and he rebooted and when his computer started back up he reopened the exact same excel file and all changes since April were lost. I had him search the hard drive for other files with the same name in case he was opening the wrong file but no other files appeared. My thoughts are that he somehow saved over his file with an older version but he claims that he has no other version and this wasn't possible. Is there something I could be missing? Is it possible for a file to revert back to an older version. I'm 99.9% sure this isn't possible but I just wanted to consult with someone else to just confirm. Thanks

Yes it sometimes happens. The following link explains how Excel provides automatic recovery for a corrupted file as a result of the PC hangup especially when the file was in use. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/e... i_Xp/VistaUser

To prevent this from happening again, tell your friend to configure Excel to autosave open files every x minute. i_Xp/VistaUser

This file has been updated and saved probably 1000 times since April 07, however all changes since April 07 were lost. Could this still be related to autorecovery?

If he is really desperate, he could try using a file recovery program and see if any files listed look like the one he needs.