The developers of the world’s most popular operating system knew that accidents can happen. The first place to look for a lost Excel file is the Windows Recycle Bin. If you are faced with a lost or deleted Excel file, there are several methods with which you can attempt to recover it.

Ensure that both the ‘Save AutoRecover information every X minutes’ and ‘Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving’ are checked.

Use the following steps to configure AutoRecover in Excel. We recommend that you turn it on and set the save interval to a small number that eliminates the possibility of losing a lot of unsaved work. You can control how often files are saved automatically or turn off the feature if you don’t want to use it. You need to configure the AutoRecover settings in Excel to use the feature.

The file will open in Excel and you can use the Save As option to save it to your desired location.

Locate the lost file and double-click it to open the document.

Scroll down and click the Recover Unsaved Workbooks button.

Click Open and then select the Recent Workbooks option on the top left.

It’s called AutoRecover and here’s how to use it to get back an Excel file that was not saved. Luckily, Microsoft has built an autosave function into the app that can help you get back an unsaved file.

🖥️ PC crash – Your machine might suddenly stop working, leaving you with unsaved Excel files after the crash.

🚫 Application failure – The program can sometimes hang, making it necessary to perform a force quit which may result in an unsaved Excel file.

😱 Human error – You might have closed an Excel document without saving your file.

You can run into the problem of needing to recover an Excel file that has not been saved for several reasons.

Recovering an overwritten Excel file with Previous Versions Recover from a backup I need to recover an Excel file that was saved over.

I want to recover an accidentally closed Excel file. Recovering an unsaved Excel file Recover from a backup My Excel crashed and I didn’t save the file. I deleted the file and it’s not in the Recycle Bin. Recover from the Recycle Bin Recover from a backup Recover with data recovery software

Excel 2016 file location