How to Recover Unsaved Document/Workbook in Excel?

Recovering Excel Documents

Sometimes Excel documents crashes abruptly while working on them is the common complaint we get from excel users. But there is no need to panic because we have some of the amazing excel workbook recovery techniques such as ‘Recover Unsaved Workbooks‘ and ‘Autosave ‘ option.

All the experts today have gone through this once upon a time. This is where we need to be aware of some of the amazing excel workbook recovery techniques to “recover documents in excel”. In this article, we will take you through in detail the steps involved in recovering documents in excel.

How to use Auto Recover Option?

It is quite common that we create new workbooks in the middle of some works we are doing. In such cases, we create a new workbook and start working with it without saving it first. When all the work is closed we need to save and close it but most of the people forget to save so end up losing the work they have done with that new workbook.

However, we can still recover those unsaved workbooks if we have enabled “AutoSave in excel” and “Auto Recovery” options in Excel. Even though this feature is enabled by default not many users aware of it so they go for work all over again.

Follow the below steps to enable this option and learn how to use it when we accidentally close the workbook without saving it.

Step 1: Go to the FILE tab in the ribbon.

Step 2: Under the FILE tab chooses “OPTIONS”.

Step 3: This will open up “Excel Options”, choose the “Save” tab in this.

Step 4: In this tab, we can do all the things that are related to the “Save” option of workbook.

The first section in this tab is “Save Workbook”.

In this section, we have several other options as well.

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The first thing in this section is “Save Files in this Format” i.e. when we save the file what should be the file format, so we can choose the file format that is needed.

Next up is “Save Auto Recover Information Every — Minute” i.e. for how many minutes we need to auto recover the work we have done with workbook. So I have chosen every 1 minute. By default, it will be 10 minutes.

Just below that, we can see a small checkbox that says “Keep the last autosaved version if I close without closing”, so this will autosave the workbook even though if you have not saved it before closing.

Ok, that’s all now open new blank workbook and work for some time lets say for 2 to 3 minutes, it depends on the time you set on Auto Recovery. Since I have set it for 1 minute I can work for 1 or 2 minutes.

As you keep working on with the workbook we can observe for every 1 minute it says “Saving Auto Recover Info” as shown in the below image.

Now I have done some work with excel workbook which is not saved.

Now I will close it without saving it.

Ok, we have closed the workbook “Book1” without saving it, we have done some work but there is no copy of this workbook at the moment we need to recover this workbook.

How to Recover Document in Excel?

To recover the unsaved workbook first, open one new blank excel workbook.

Step 1: Click on the “File” tab

Step 2: In this click on the “Info” tab

Step 3: Click on Manage Version and Choose “Recover Unsaved Workbooks” Option

Under this we can see “Manage Versions”, click on the drop-down list of this and choose “Recover Unsaved Workbooks”.

Step 4: Choose the workbook you wish to Recover

This will take you to the auto recover folder path where it has saved a copy of all the unsaved workbooks.

In this section, we can see all the unsaved workbooks, choose the workbook that you wish to recover.

Step 5: Click on Open option to open the unsaved workbook

When we click on “Open” we can see the below workbook.

We can see the work we have done before the last recovery happened, click on the “Save As” option in excel at the top to save the workbook this time.

Like this, we can recover the workbook which is not saved previously.

Things to Remember

Auto Recovery depends on the time we set to recover.
In case of recovery time is more then you may not get the recent work recovery.

Recover Document in Excel