Were you working in an Excel, but lost it because you didn’t save it? We are going to show you what steps you should follow to recover an unsaved Excel file so that you can recover it if it is possible and you can continue working with it.
Office has long offered the ability to autosave to OneDrive , Microsoft’s cloud. What this functionality does is perform an automatic save every so often , to avoid the user doing it manually every time he wants.
This has an advantage, it is unlikely that you will lose the Excel workbook , as it will always be saved, so it is advisable to activate this possibility. Otherwise, we can lose it for not having saved it, something not very pleasant.
Recover from Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel offers an option that allows you to recover files that you did not save at the time for any reason, either because you forgot, or simply because there was a power outage, computer error or any other incident.
Whatever the situation, there is a small possibility of recovery through an option in the office software itself, we will show you below:
- Enter Excel and go to the file / information menu and click on “manage book”, select “recover unsaved books”.
- In the new window, an Excel file should appear, click on the one you think you have lost and click “open” again , then you can save it normally.
If you notice that no file appears in that window, that is, in the “Excel unsaved files” window , there is no possibility of recovering them, because in this case it was not saved at the time, which is not the same as having it saved and lose it later.
Another possibility to recover it is to go through the File / open menu and click on the option that you will see at the bottom called ” Recover unsaved books “, it will take you to the same window as the last step that we showed you previously.
Use specialized software
In case the previous procedure has not worked, you can resort to specialized data recovery software (photos, videos, etc.). A free option that you can try is EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free, which allows you to recover unsaved Excel files.
- Download EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free for Windows
Just download the utility and open it, then choose the hard drive from where we want to recover that file and then click “scan” to start the deep search process in search of all types of files, including Excel files.
Once finished, you would have to click on “filter / advanced filter” and choose “excel” and “existing files” to filter only Excel files, so that only these files will appear on the screen and none more than those that have been found in the analysis.
Now it would be enough to mark the filtered files and click on the “recover” option so that you can have access to them, it is recommended that you mark them all so that you can check them one by one, although it may take you a long time to open them all.
This last option is also valid in case you have saved an Excel, but for whatever reason you deleted it due to formatting, deletion or other fact that led to its deletion, so it is something that you should take into account.
What can you do to avoid losing Excel files and other Office documents like a Word file or PowerPoint presentation? Well, save from time to time manually or activate automatic autosave , to enable it do the following:
- In case you have Office 365, click above where it says “autosave”, you will have to log in with an Outlook or Hotmail account for this possibility to take effect.
You can also activate auto recovery , do the following:
- Go to File / options. Enter the “save” section and check the box “save auto-recovery information” , putting 1 minute, for example, and also the one that says “keep the last version automatically recovered when I close without saving”. In this way, your Excel file can always be recovered in the future if it suffers an unexpected closure and you have not saved.
There are different procedures that aim to recover an unsaved Excel file , we recommend that you start with the first one we have mentioned and then continue with the rest, if you cannot rescue it, save it frequently for future occasions.
