Salvaging the accidents

The "oh crumbs!" moment is a fact of life when you work with computers. (Ok, I'll admit it, the strength of the expletive is in direct proportion to the severity of the stuff-up.) How many times have I accidentally deleted text I have slaved over, or destroyed a work of art in Photoshop with a slip of the mouse?
When this happens, I try hard not to panic, stop everything, take a deep breath, and then hit "undo" keys, Ctrl-Z. (I wish life had a Ctrl-Z key to erase those dumb things I do or say.) Some programs, such as Word, have almost unlimited levels of undo. Just keep hitting Ctrl-Z, and you can go back a long way down the path you have come. If you undo too much, you can redo by going to the Edit menu and choosing that option. Some programs, like PhotoShop, by default have only one level of undo. Then, Ctrl-Z becomes a toggle between undoing and redoing. However, PhotoShop also has a History function, found under the Window menu, which allows you to go back to any particular action and alter it.
Some programs have a Revert function (usually found under the File menu). Choosing this takes the document back to the last-saved version. Depending on how frequently you save, this may take you back further than you wanted to go, but it can salvage many worst-case scenarios. As I have got myself into the habit of saving text documents at least every five minutes, Revert has been my saviour on many occasions.
Word does not have a Revert feature, but one more option is open to you, which also works for every other program without exception. Simply close the document, and when you are prompted, do not save the changes. That will take the document back to its last-saved version.