IMPORTANT: Even though Office provides these AutoRecovery/AutoSave features, the Save button is still your best friend. To be sure you don’t lose your latest work, don’t forget to periodically click Save or press CTRL+S.

Ever had just one of them days where you’ve spent hours working on a document or workbook, only to have Windows or Office unexpectedly crash before you had the opportunity to save your work? Or worse, somehow managed to accidentally close everything because you were multi-tasking and got a little mixed up in which application you were closing.

We’ve all been guilty of getting carried away with our work and forgotten to press the magical CTRL + S combination or simply had a momentarily lapse in judgement and accidentally closed something we didn’t mean to – this however does not mean you have to be punished and start all over again because Microsoft Office has a fantastic feature built-in where it can recover unsaved new documents!

To use this feature, you will need to have the following enabled inside Microsoft Office:

  • Save AutoRecover information every XX minutes
  • Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving

Fortunately, these two items should be enabled by default, you can confirm this by opening an office application like Word and going to File > Options > Save:

Office Recovery Features

By default Office will will essentially automatically save all your work every 10 minutes and keep the last autosaved version should you ever accidentally close the application without saving.

How to recover the unsaved items

Here are a few ways of recovering your unsaved new documents, workbooks, or presentations in Microsoft Office Excel, Work, or PowerPoint if you inadvertently close it before saving it or have an outage/crash:

  1. Open the Office application you were using
  2. Click the File tab
  3. Click Recent
  4. Click Recover Unsaved Documents / Recover Unsaved Workbooks / Recover Unsaved Presentations

You can also get to the same files another way:

  1. Open the Office application you were using
  2. Click File
  3. Click Info
  4. Click Manage Versions > Recover Unsaved Documents / Recover Unsaved Workbooks / Recover Unsaved Presentations

Recover Unsaved Documents

In both instances you will be presented with a list of your unsaved files. From here you can select, open and most importantly save the document you wish to recover.

Congratulations, you’ve now managed to recover that lengthy document you spent all morning working on. Wipe the sweat from your brow, grab yourself a coffee to relax and remember – in future save, save, save!

Note: The two aforementioned methods are the ideal and recommended way of recovering your documents and should be tried first. If for someone reason getting to the unsaved documents via the methods mentioned above does not work, you can always try navigating directly to the UnsavedFiles directory by going to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles in Windows Explorer.

Article By Techzilla