Well, you can’t do much when Word freezes. You have two choices really. Hang out, perhaps the frozen Word will unfreeze, or force quit Word through the task manager and HOPE that your auto save kicked in right before the freeze, a gamble really. Another thing you can try is to close Outlook and then wait for Word to unfreeze, another gamble. Word and Outlook work together and sometimes there are conflicts between the two when they are both open which can cause the freeze. There really is no easy solution once Word freezes. It’s much easier to take a defensive approach to make sure if it happens, your covered. It’s like a swat team measuring possible losses during a rescue mission. The hostages are your document. We want to lower collateral damage and get out of there with as much of your document intact as possible with the least amount of loss, and this is how we do it.

Word has an auto-save feature built in and by default, as long as you save the file first, it will auto save changes every 10 minutes. This is WAY too long for most people, so I always suggest changing it to every 5 minutes or even every 2 minutes. Sometimes there are problems when changing to every 1 minute. The trick is that if your Word freezes (and it will), you want as much saved as possible. It’s almost a given that your Word will freeze. MAC or PC your Word will freeze. Below is a step by step tutorial on how to change this default save feature within Word 2007 & 2010.

 

Step 1. Word 2007

Open Word 2007, then hit the office button on the top left, and click “Word Options” on the bottom right.

Step 1. Word 2010

Open Word 2010, click “File” on the top left and then “Options” toward the bottom.

Step 2. Word 2007 & 2010

Click on “Save” on the left side, 4th from the top and then on the right side you will see, second line down, “Save AutoRecover information Every.” Like we mentioned, the default is 10 minutes. Change it to 2, hit OK and close Word to save.