How to Recover an Unsaved or Lost Microsoft Word, Excel Document or PowerPoint Presentation βš•οΈπŸ“–πŸ’₯

Veronika Shmatko
Hetman Software Video
3 min readNov 22, 2019

This and other videos you can watch on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5jWHA0ow74

πŸ‘ Watch how to recover an unsaved, damaged or lost Microsoft Word document, Microsoft Excel worksheet or PowerPoint presentation. This video will be useful in case if you closed a document by accident and forgot to save it, there was a software failure, or the laptop battery went flat before you could save a document, or if you run into an error when trying to open a document, worksheet or presentation.

Read: How To Recover an Unsaved Microsoft Word Document β€” https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery_news/how-to-recover-unsaved-microsoft-word-document.htm

I will demonstrate document recovery with the example of Microsoft Word, but these steps will be the same for Excel and PowerPoint.

Many of us know that any program in the Microsoft Office package offers to save the original document or an autosaved version of the file which was closed suddenly.

Such file will open automatically in the Document Recovery section after the program is started again. To recover such a file, click on the arrow next to the recovered file in the Document Recovery pane and select Open or Save, or just click on it.

But this method is good only if a Microsoft Office program was closed unexpectedly. It may happen if the computer shuts down or there is a power cut.

Please note: Word, Excel or PowerPoint suggest recovering files only at the first restart of the program after an emergency shutdown. That is, if you open Word, close it, and then open it again, it will not offer you anything. That is why I recommend to save everything you need at the first start of the program after the shutdown.

What should you do if you closed a document without saving it?

β€’ For example, I have a document I have been working on.

  • I close it.
  • β€’ When asked if I want to save changes, I click β€œDon’t Save” as if accidentally.
  • β€’ After that, I understand I was wrong, so I open the document again and see that the last changes are gone. To recover them:
  • β€’ Go to the tab File / Info
  • β€’ Find the section Manage Document (Manage Workbook in Excel, or Manage Presentation in PowerPoint)
  • β€’ I can see that the version of my document closed wthout saving is shown there.

If there are several elements on the list and you don’t know which one to save, then have a look at the date and time when autosaved documents were created. It will help you understand which file to recover. If you see several versions of the same file, it may be better to open the latest one because it is likely to have the last changes.

This and other videos you can watch on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5jWHA0ow74

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