We recommend keeping the other two options at their default settings, unless you have a good reason to change them.Īnd that’s about it! The Office recovery feature won’t save you from every kind of mishap you might run into with your files, but it can sure come in handy during those occasional moments of panic. We’ve found that the background saving doesn’t really interrupt anything, so usually set it down to around two minutes. You can set it to autosave anywhere from every one minute to every 120 minutes. If autosaving every 10 minutes seems like too long an interval (it does to us), bump that setting down to whatever you want. The top few options are what you’re looking for. Recovering Word documents that didn’t save doesn’t always stem from user errors. Until that happens, you have a chance to recover Word documents. On the Options page, click Save and then look for the “Save Documents” section. The file actually exists on the disc until its space is overwritten by new information. You can also change how each Office application saves these temporary files, including where the files are saved, how often they’re saved, and whether a temporary file is kept if you close a document without saving. Change How Office Applications Automatically Save Files
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Office applications automatically save temporary backups of files at periodic intervals (every 10 minutes, by default), so your file should contain most of the work you lost. Select the file you need and then click Open.
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The UnsavedFiles folder contains all unsaved files Office has created temporary backups for. On the Info page, click “Manage Document” and then, from the drop-down menu, choose “Recover Unsaved Documents.” Note also that you have an option for deleting all unsaved documents should you want to do that. Start by opening whatever Office application you were working in where your file didn’t get saved. You might just have to hunt around a bit for the actual commands. Also, the recovery feature has been around for a long time, so if you’re using an older version of Office (going back to at least Office 2007), you’ll still be able to attempt recovery.
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#I ACCIDENTALLY DIDN T SAVE MY WORD DOCUMENT HOW TO#
RELATED: Why Deleted Files Can Be Recovered, and How You Can Prevent It How to Recover an Unsaved Office Fileįor these instructions, we’re working in Word 2016, but the steps are almost identical in other Office 2016 applications like Excel and PowerPoint. That said, if you do run into a problem with an unsaved Office file, here’s how to recover it. Here are the steps to take to recover your unsaved new document in Microsoft Office Excel, Word, or PowerPoint if you inadvertently close it before saving it: Open the Office application that you were using. Back up your computer regularly and consider turning on the file version feature in in Windows. Also, you’d be well served to put some additional preventative measures in place before you actually run into this problem. We’re not talking here about when you’ve actually deleted a file in Windows, though there are ways you might recover from that kind of mishap as well.