Is it a version of Office installed on your PC, or running in the cloud?

For Word on your PC, open Word, and look at your recently edited documents to see whether the missing document is listed there. If you can still open it, use Save As to save it to a known location such as Documents. This is especially important if you originally opened it from an email, since it may be in a temporary folder that gets flushed at regular intervals by cleanup software.

For Word in the cloud, check your SkyDrive/OneDrive.

P.S. I don't think this really is a Firefox problem, but if there is a Firefox angle that I'm missing, let me know the connection.

it's not in office at all. It's not in cloud, I'm using my toshiba with windows 7.

Okay, that's confusing. What version of Microsoft Word do you have?

Word 2013 - not familiar

Word 2010 - when you click the File menu on the ribbon, the recently edited files should be listed on the right side when you click Recent. If you see it there, click it to open it.

Word 2007 - when you click the round office button in the upper left corner, the recently edited files should be listed down the right side. If you see it there, click it to open it.

Word 2003 - I think there was a Recently Edited or Recently Used item on the File menu. Can you find the document there and click it?

If there's no indication in MS word of it, was it a document you opened from an email in Firefox? If so, look in your Windows temp folder. To access that folder, you can paste the following in the Start menu search box and press Enter:

%LocalAppData%\Temp

I suggest using the Details view and sorting by date (most recent first).

Also, FYI, this is drifting further and further away from Firefox territory, do you actually have a Firefox question? If not, let's close this thread and you can go to an Office support forum.

Jscher2000. yes, I opened the email attachment in firefox. So, Tyler, I thought this forum may help me figure it out since I hit the save button in office 7, but it wasn't saved to desktop.

anyway. jscher2000, I think i've looked through the bowels of my computer and still don't see it. it's weird, but maybe Tyler is right and I should try an office support forum.

You should never edit a file that you downloaded via Firefox and opened via the download dialog and save it under the same name in the same folder as that will likely cause your edits to get lost.
You should always save the file in a different location.
Firefox usually saves such a file that is passed to an external program in the %temp% folder and possibly set the file to read-only.

Here is what you do.

First, in the Control Panel you change the settings so that the hidden files and folders are visible (Folder Options) etc. Your file is in AppData hiden folder (which you have just "unhidden") so run a search in Explorer for your file there. It will be somewhere under AppData\Local\Temp.

Hope this helps.

Jaroslaw Piskorski

locking elderly thread