How to recover an unsaved excel file

You just finished editing an Excel file, but end up losing the file because you didn’t save it or there was a technical problem . You may even end up losing an entire spreadsheet for some reason. Losing an excel can be frustrating because it can take some time to fix the problem.

However, the good thing is that you have some solutions at hand that can help you recover unsaved Excel files . Let’s see how.

Table of Contents

method 1

Before going into details on how to fix problems encountered in Excel while saving, it is important to know why an Excel file did not save . After all, everyone may be wondering “why didn’t this particular Excel file get saved?” . So these could be the reasons that caused the problem:

The location where you want to save the Excel file does not have enough disk space.
The Excel file you are trying to save is shared.
A third-party application or antivirus software has interrupted the saving process.
You have exceeded the 218 character limit when naming your file.
The Excel file has been damaged.

Well having said that, let’s see the first method to recover unsaved Excel file.

Step 1:Run
Step 2:Open a Blank Book .
Step 3: Now go to the Filetab at the top left of the spreadsheet.
Step 4:Go to the right part of the window which is called Recent Books.
Step 5:Now scroll down and click on Recover Unsaved Books button .
Next, you should be redirected to the unsaved files location where you may have the unsaved files that you are trying to recover. Select the unsaved file and click Open.

Now you can recover your unsaved excel document.

method 2

To recover a deleted excel, a powerful tool that will help you with this is Tenorshare 4DDiG Data Recovery , in this section we will tell you the steps to follow so that you can recover your deleted files.

Step 1 – Select a location:Open the 4DDiG application on your computer and select the drive where the excel should be located and click “Scan” to continue.

Step 2 – Scan the drive to find deleted excel files: The application will start scanning the drive for the deleted files, obviously you will not only find excel files, but different formats. You can preview the found files as they are found. You can also opt for a “Deep Scan” if you are not satisfied with the results of the initial scan.

Step 3 – Recover unsaved excel file:After the scan is complete, select the Excel files you want to recover and click “Recover” and save the files to your computer.

method 3

Step 1:Open a blank Workbook in Excel and click the File tab.
Step 2:Then you need to click on File and then on
Step 3: In the Excel Optionswindow , click Save on the left side of the panel.
Step 4:Now go to the right side of the window and under the Save books section , make sure that the autorecover information is being saved every X minutes. You can adjust the minutes according to your needs.
Step 5:Now if you look immediately below there you have a field called “AutoRecover file location” , well what you need to do now is copy that path that is there.
Step 6:Open File Explorer, delete the path that is there and paste the one you just copied from the Excel AutoRecover location and hit Enter.

Here in the Excel folder, you can check if there is any useful file. You can open and save them to any location you like.

Method 4

Temporary files are great for backups. Therefore, if you have lost unsaved Excel files, you can search for any temporary file and recover it accordingly. Let’s see how to do it.

Solution #1 – Using the location of unsaved files in File Explorer

Step 1:Press Windows + E keys simultaneously to open File Explorer .
Step 2:Being in the File Explorer, as we did in the previous method, you must delete the path and paste the one that we will put next:

C:\Users\Your Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

Note: After Users you must write your username, be it Laura, Juan or Pedro, the rest if you must leave it as it is.

Here you can find all the temporary Excel files that you have lost, open the file and save it.

Solution #2 – Find UnsavedFiles folder from Excel

Step 1:Open Excel and create a Blank Workbook . Now, go to the File tab at the top left corner of the window.
Step 2:Being in the File menu, select Information on the left side of the book.
Step 3:Now click on Versions and then on Recover Unsaved Books .

Doing this will take you to the location of UnsavedFiles in File Explorer as shown in Solution 1. Select the unsaved file, open the file and save it to a folder of your choice.

conclusion

Now you know how to recover unsaved or deleted Excel file that you cannot find in recycle bin. You can try the above solutions or methods and recover unsaved Excel.

In case manual solutions fail to recover unsaved Excel document, you can proceed to solution method 2 ( 4DDiG Data Recovery ) . This is a safe solution to recover unsaved Excel file efficiently.