How to find a missing saved excel file. Help!!!!

A FB friend wrote this and we are trying to help her. Any ideas?

anybody know how i would recover an excel s/s i have been working on for 4 days, i saved as i went along and now i can't find it? things i have done already: *tried to find temp files, although it appears i do not have them on this new work laptop, *search the usual folders that it is kept in, *looked in the recycle bin, *looked in the most recent doc, *looked in the most recent files on excel.

Did you search all files and folders for *.xls files? That should find all your excel spreadsheets, I think! She did that.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5103869_recover ... osave.html Did this

If using Excel 2007, may be saved as one of the new extensions.

From Wikipedia:

Excel 2007 File Type Extension
xlsx - Excel 2007 XML Workbook
xlsm - Excel 2007 XML Macro-Enabled Workbook
xltx - Excel 2007 XML Template
xltm - Excel 2007 XML Macro-Enabled Template
xlsb - Excel 2007 binary workbook (BIFF12)
xlam - Excel 2007 XML Macro-Enabled Add-In
xll - Excel 2007 compiled macros[1]

Try searching all folders and files for those extensions.

go look in your user document settings recent files folder.

One time I accidently saved a file opened as an email attachemnent. It can go to a system temp folder and is hard to find.

Her latest response.

it is excel 2003. i called my helpdesk and they didn't even know how to help me. geez!

Create a new worksheet, save it as 'findloc' or something similar. Search all files and folders for 'findloc'.* - this should show where Excel is saving files. Go to that location and look at all the files there. If Excel was for some reason unable to save the file you want, it should be in that location with an 8 character file name and no extension. You should be able to open that file name with Excel and save it as what you want it to be.

Thx JF1. Nothing seems to work. It must be gone.