How to Recover Unsaved Microsoft Office File

The last thing you want to happen is that you accidentally click Don’t Save when closing an Office document. It could also be that Word crashed or your laptop lost power before you remembered to save the work you were doing. There is a good chance that you will be able to recover your documents if they are automatically saved in a temporary backup by Office applications every time you work on them.

There are ways you can recover from a mistake you may have made when you accidentally delete a file in Windows. Nevertheless, we are not talking about recovering from an error when you delete a file in Windows. Furthermore, you would be well served to put some additional preventative measures before you run into this problem and deal with it. 

Keep a regular backup of your computer and consider turning on the file version feature in Windows to ensure your files are always up to date. Despite this, there are ways to recover unsaved Office files if you have a problem with one.  

The steps are almost identical in other Microsoft 365 applications such as Excel and PowerPoint, but we’re using the Microsoft Word version included in Microsoft 365 for these instructions. Office 2021 will follow the same pattern. 

Furthermore, the recovery feature has been around for quite some time, so you can still try recovering a document using an older version of Word, such as Word 2016. Finding the actual commands might require a bit of hunting.

Unsaved files can be recovered in two ways! Here’s how:

Recover Unsaved Documents

Just open up Word or any other Office program to get started and click on the “Open” tab.

 Near the bottom right corner of the window, click the “Recover Unused Documents” button.

Select the unsaved file you wish to restore.

Managing Documents: Recover a File

Alternatively, you can use the Manage Document button. If your file wasn’t saved in any Office application, start by opening that application. Navigate to the File menu.

The File menu contains an option called “Info.”

Then click “Manage Documents” and select “Recover Unsaved Documents.” You may also choose to delete all unsaved documents from the drop-down menu.

All unsaved files Office has created temporary backups of are located in the UnsavedFiles folder. Click Open when you have selected the file you need.

Most of the work you lose should be in the temporary backup files saved by Office at regular intervals (every 10 minutes, by default.

Save Office Files Automatically

In addition, each Office application lets you control how files are saved, where they’re saved, how often they’re saved, and whether a temporary file is kept if a document isn’t saved.

Then click the Options button on the File menu.

Find the “Save Documents” section on the Options page by clicking Save. If you’re looking for something in the top few options, you’ve found it.

We find autosaving every five minutes too long, so we reduce it to whatever works for you. Autosaving can be set anywhere from once a minute to every 120 minutes. Generally, we set the background saving to around two minutes since it doesn’t interrupt anything. 

Unless you have a compelling reason to change them, we recommend keeping the other two options at their default settings.

That’s all there is to it! There will be some mishaps with your files that Office Recovery won’t be able to fix. Even so, it can certainly prove helpful when panic strikes.