I spent several hours working on a Word doc and when I closed it accidentally clicked the "no" response when asked whether or not I wanted to save my changes. Is all that work lost, or is there a magic bullet that can come to my rescue?

You will have to start from scratch.

This is why I always do CTRL+A, CTRL+C before I save/exit any text document. You can never be sure.

Lesson learned.

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of...Oh, well. I wrote it once, I can write it again. Too bad I'll only get paid once.

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

From now on, set auto save on.