Sunday, September 29, 2013

Recover a file you didn't save in Office 2010 and 2013



Did you know that in Office 2010 & 2013 you can recover a file you never saved?   
There are a few stipulations:

  1. You must recover it within a few days of when you created it.
  2. Your Office program must have Auto-Recover turned on.
  3. The elapsed time between creating the file and closing the file must be greater than the Auto-Recover time set.
 First, let's set up Auto-Recover:
  1. Open your Office 2010 or 2013 program, i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
  2. Click File (tab) > Options.
  3. Click Save in the left Navigation Pane. 
  4. Verify there is a check in "Save AutoRecover information every __ minutes."  Set the number from 5 to 10 minutes.  This is the amount of time that elapses before your program will recover the file. Also check the box "Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving."
  5. Click OK at the bottom of the window.
Now you can recover a file by following the steps below:
  1. Open the program in which you created the file (that you didn't save).
  2. Do ONE of the following:
    1. Office 2010 - click File (tab) > Recent
    2. Office 2013 - click File (tab)> Open
  3. At the bottom of the window, click Recover Unsaved Documents
  4. A window will open showing all unsaved documents for the past few days.
  5. Select the file and click Open.



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