Lousiness, power cuts , blue screens, PC crashes you name it. There might be plenty of reasons why you did not save the document that you just worked on for hours. Before you start cussing yourself when you see all your work gone, there is a neat little way to save your skin in Office 2010.
Cut the cruft. Just show me how to recover
If you do the above mistake, you can recover the file by following the following steps.
- Navigate to File Ribbon
- Choose the Recent Tab
- Select “Recover Unsaved Documents”
Select the file to recover from the Open menu
And you are done. Your unsaved file is recovered with just these few steps. You can then save your file.
You can also recover your unsaved files by navigating to the Info tab in the File ribbon and then selecting Manage Versions > Recover Unsaved Documents
Also note that You can also browse to one of the following file locations to open the file, depending on your operating system:
- Windows 8/7/Windows Vista
C:\Users\User_Name_Here\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles - Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\User_Name_Here\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles
These file locations cannot be changed. Files in these folders will be kept for four days after creation.
Can I change the recovery options?
All the core Office 2010 applications, Word , PowerPoint and Excel feature automatic saving of unsaved data. So even if you don’t save your files, Office 2010 saves the files in the background for you. The interval for auto save can be tweaked in the the Save options in Office
To tweak the file save interval change the “Save AutoRecover information every x minutes” to your desired value. If you have a not too powerful machine, setting this value to something lower may help. Else setting the value to 1 minute should be just fine.
To have the recovery of unsaved files working, you must have the “keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving” option checked.
The method shown here is used for recovering unsaved Word 2010 files, but the same procedure will work just fine in PowerPoint 2010 and Excel 2010 as well.
