If the document was "mission critical", that is, it contained irreplaceable information, you might be able to recover some or all of it with Power Quest's Lost and Found.
A file overwrite doesn't necessarily "overwrite" anything. If you save an empty file over a pre-existing filename, at worst, you may lose only a few bytes from the original. The rest can be recovered. Recovery would work best if haven't written to the hard drive since you lost the doc (or even used the computer, since Windows writes huge quantities to the swap file every time it runs).
This is truely, one of the most amazing programs I have ever seen. A few months ago, I had an opportunity to give it a good workout. My primary hard disk had taken a big hit and was unreadable by any of my utilities (it turns out that the first 64 sectors had gone totally bad. Anyone who is familiar with the layout of a disk knows that those sectors contain the drive parameter, partition data and the root directory entries).
The process was slow and painstaking (it took about four days) but, not only did I recover all of my data, I recovered files that had been deleted many months previously (obviously, stuff I didn't want anymore... L&F didn't know that).
As a testament to the power of this program please consider the history of the data on this drive: in 1991 it was a whopping 128mb. The contents were copied to 250mb, then a 512mb then a 2gb and finally the 6gb that failed. During those nine years, files were written and deleted, directories where created, moved and deleted, the file system went from DOS 5.0 through seven versions of Windows, firmware sector translation (EZdrive) was used and removed... generally speaking, nothing should have remained from the original drive.
And yet, after running Lost and Found, I opened a curious folder and found myself staring at a ghostly yet exact image of the original directory structure of the original drive. I didn't think it was possible, but seeing was believing.
[sig]<p> <br><a href=mailto: > </a><br><a href=
plain black box</a><br>Don't sit down. It's time to dig another one.[/sig]