How to Recover a Microsoft Office File You Forgot to Save
They work diligently on an Excel spreadsheet, making sure that everyone Numbers are accurate and everything looks Great. You are a machine: nothing can stop you from mastering this task and impressing your boss. Except, however, for a power outage shuts down your PC before you can save. now You must either start from scratch or quit your job and never look back.
Not so fast: while it’s a bit dangerous not to save your work, losing such a document isn’t a death sentence. If you accidentally closed an Office document without saving it for any reason, you don’t need to worry about starting over. There is an easy way to recover the file using a recovery tool built right into the Office app you are using.
When you’re working on a document in Word, Excel, or another Office app, the file isn’t just backed up when you click the Save button. The app in question stored the data for this file in its roaming folder in your user account’s AppData folder. This folder, which is not normally visible to most users, stores data from various Windows apps for your user account.
In most cases, a recently closed, unsaved Office document can be found here. There are two main ways to find it. The first is the simplest and most direct as it takes you directly to the roaming folder containing the missing document. First, open the app you originally closed, click the “File” tab in the top left, then select “About”. Now click on “Manage Document” and then on “Recover Unsaved Documents”. Here you should see the file you closed without saving: select it and then click “Save As” to make sure you don’t lose it again.
If you want to feel a little more “technical,” there’s a slightly more advanced method that can achieve the same result. Press Windows+R to open the Run window. Then type %appdata% and run it to open the roaming folder. From here, follow the file path to your app’s folder (for example, open the Microsoft folder and then the Word folder). This is the folder that the first method takes you straight to, so you should see your missing file. Open it again and save it.
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