How to Recover Unsaved Files in Microsoft Office

Note: Microsoft Office has two ways in which files are able to be recovered.

Method 1 - Describes how to recover a never saved file, which means you started a new file, added some content to it, but then never saved it.

Method 2 - Describes how to recover a file that was saved to a permanent location at some point but recent changes to the file were not manually saved by the user but may have been saved by the default AutoRecover feature that is configurable under File > Options > Save > Save workbooks > AutoRecover file location. AutoRecover saves information every 10 minutes by default. 

Method 1

Open the Microsoft Office program you are trying to recover the document from.

In this example, I will be using Excel, but this works in Word and PowerPoint as well.

Step 1:
Click on File at the top left of the application.

Step 2:

Click the "Recover Unsaved Workbooks" (Workbooks, Documents, or Presentations depending on which Office application).

Step 3:

An open file dialog will appear at the location below allowing you to select an unsaved workbook to open. Once you open the file, you can then save it to a permanent location of your choosing as normal.

C:\Users\firstname.lastname\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

Method 2

Step 1:
Open File Explorer and browse to the default Auto Recover location for the application (Excel, Word, or PowerPoint).

C:\Users\firstname.lastname\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel

Step 2:
Open the folder named after the file you're looking for, and then open the file inside of it.

Step 3:

You can now save the file to a new permanent location of your choosing as normal, or you can click the Restore button shown below, which causes Excel to save and overwrite the restored file to its original saved location.

Use Restore with caution as it overwrites the files original saved location which may not be desired.