Update: If you’re running an older version of Office, check out our article using the Auto Recover feature in Office 2010.
Recover Office Documents
Microsoft Word is one of the most widely used programs within Office. So whether you’re a professional who needs their work back or a student desperately trying to recover their 10-page paper, it’s a lot easier to recover files with the last several versions of Microsoft Office.
Recover a Word Doc
Open Word, Go to File > Open, and Click the Recover Unsaved Documents button.
This should have your document in a folder ready to open. Typically with the newer versions of Word, when you restart from a crash, the Office program will actually ask you if you want to open unsaved documents.
Recovering Excel Workbooks and PowerPoint Presentations
The great thing about the current version of Microsoft Office is that the options are all very similar with slight differences for certain features and aspects, but recovering a document is the same process no matter what program you use. So whether you’re in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the steps are the same, the names of the documents are different. In Excel, it’s a Workbook, and in PowerPoint, it’s a presentation.
AutoRecover
Although enabled by default, I recommend everyone confirm AutoRecover is enabled and creating backups, so you don’t have to take any extreme measures to recover your unsaved files in case of a computer crash or unexpected restart. To do this, go to File > Options > Save and make sure that you check the box next to where it says Save AutoRecover information every 10 minutes. The default setting here is 10 minutes; however, feel free to change this to whatever you personally prefer. Five minutes is good enough to ensure that my files will be there after a crash.
Keep in mind that these apps are part of the Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) suite of Office programs. With a subscription, you also get 1 TB of storage for each user too. or search for “Excel 2016 AutoRecover not working – NO files being saved to the AutoRecover File location Comment Name * Email *
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