Excel, Word problem when closing

I'm running the student 2003 versions of Word and Excel. When these files close they do not display a dialog box asking if I want to save my work or not. While I'm pretty good at saving stuff as a rule I lost a bunch of work today when someone logged me off, thus they had no way of saving my work for me.

How do I turn this function back on?

 

No. I've had this bug for a while. I've gotten good at saving my work before I move away from it but if I don't save before I close there is no prompt. And since sometimes the computer glitches and needs a hard shut down or needs to reboot when installing a program, if my saves aren't up to date it does not prompt me. Usually I can recover a file but there must have been text highlighted that got deleted before the log-out. Yesterday was the final straw when it came to living with it.

 

Thanks for that Steve. I did see a box under 'default format' that was unchecked that disables features introduced after...and then I had the choices for a couple earlier versions which THEN saves Word files as a Word doc. , an XML document etc.

For some reason checking that now seems to bring up the dialog box for Word that asks if I want to save an unsaved document. In Excel there is an option to disable the AutoRecover and though that doesn't seem like a good idea but it seems to work but it seems like a bad idea to me should my computer unexpectedly shut down without closing properly. Does anyone know if there are any caveats for doing this?