Recovering Unsaved Documents in Microsoft Office

I got a set of worried messages from a customer of mine recently who had fired up Microsoft Word and proceeded to create a document without saving it. After spending hours on it they then shut down their PC and accidentally clicked on the option to to not save the document. Was there a way to get it back?

After a little bit of digging I found the answer. There are two ways to resolve this:

1. Quicker, slightly more techie method:

- Open a Windows Explorer window and browse to the following location:

- c:\users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

- There should be a file or files with the ASD extension. One of these will hopefully be the file you are missing.

- Double-click to check and see - the files should open up with Word.

2. Slower but less techie method:

- Open up Microsoft Word and just click on a Blank Document template to get started.

- Click on the File menu and then click Info

- Click on Manage Document

- Click Recover Unsaved Documents

- This will bring up an Open window at the location listed in Option 1

- Choose the most likely file in the list and click Open

- Once you've found the file you were looking for make sure to save it

Comments

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