Yes, there is a recovery feature in Office. No, it doesn't always work. Does anything? Luckily, Annoyances Central has a fix for recovering a Word doc after a crash. In particular this answers the question: what if my file is wonked? A bad enough crash can make reopening the doc crash Word over and over. So the idea is to fix the file, and reopen it. They have several ways to find the remnants of your Great American Novel. Ultimately, you may need to just drop into Notepad, opener of all that is unopenable. Yes, you lose all the formatting, but did you really need bold and italics to tell your tale? I didn't think so.