Word for Mac has a built-in autosave feature called AutoRecover which is on by default. This means that Word is quietly saving the document you are working on without you needing to manually tell the software to do so. For this feature to function properly you'll need to initially save the document with a.
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With the case of MS Word documents, usually it’s right before we press the save button. All that unsaved hard work goes down as lost bytes. But for a failsafe device built into. AutoRecover is the supposedly goof-proof mechanism that can get back our documents after an accidental closure. By default, MS Word 2007 makes an automatic file save every 10 minutes. I am an average Joe, but there are times when I can get a lot done in 10 minutes. Sometimes, I am an average dunce too because I forget to continuously save the work.
That’s why the need to pay closer attention to the AutoRecover setting makes for good foresightedness. AutoRecover is not a productivity substitute for the normal save operation. Saving our files consistently and continuously is a best practice.
AutoRecover to the rescue. Following a crash or an abnormal close of a document, the Document Recovery Task Pane appears with a prompt when Word is restarted.
The pane on the left hand side lists the files (usually three of the most recent) that Word managed to recover. The file name is qualified by a status indicator which gives an idea of the stage of recovery. Original indicates that the file is the same as was during the last manual save. Autosaved indicates that the file has managed to recover data between the last manual save and up to the last AutoRecover process. With the Document Recovery Task Pane, you can open and check the files for lost content.
Save the most recent version (or all of them) and delete the rest. Where are the auto-recovered backups stored?.
By default the files are placed as temporary files here (Windows XP) – C: Documents and Settings User Application Data Microsoft Word. The files have the extension ASD (Word Automatic Backup). The AutoRecover location can be modified by providing an alternate folder location.
Click on the Office button – Word Options – Advanced ““ Scroll down to the General section on the right hand pane – Click on File Locations – Modify the location for AutoRecover under File Types by assigning a different folder. Insure your documents by changing the AutoRecover interval As mentioned before, MS Word normally auto-saves a document every 10 minutes. Is it too much for you or is it too less? A few steps into Word’s settings and you can change the interval to your liking. If you are the forgetful sort, a more frequent auto-save could be the pill. Start with the Office button. Click on Word Options.
Go to Save found on the left hand column. For the section Save Documents, come to the entry – Save AutoRecover information every X minutes.
Change the time interval to your liking. Every 5 minutes should be just fine. AutoRecover consumes resources, so too frequent an interval could hit performance. Microsoft Office Suite has the AutoRecover option enabled for Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Visio and Word. In OneNote, a five second auto-save is the default (That’s why it does not have a Save button.) In a perfect world the practice of save early and save would be followed to the letter. Unfortunately, our world isn’t one.
That’s why the AutoRecover option does its best to safeguard our hard work.
UPDATE: the updated version of this post for Office 2016 / Office 365 (Word 15 / PowerPoint 15 / Excel 15) can be found here: Question: I accidentally messed up the Office documents (Word/PowerPoint/Excel) I was working on, and I didn’t save it before, so I wanted to get the auto-saved version from the AutoRecovery-folder as I’ve done before in Office 2008 and 2004. I forgot where to find the AutoRecovery-folder, so I used Office 2011’s build-in Help-option to get a hint. It told me I would be able to find the folder via this path: /Users/ username/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 AutoRecovery But when I open that folder I have a “Office 2004 AutoRecovery” and a “Office 2008 AutoRecovery”-folder, but there’s no such folder for Office 2011 I checked in the Office 2011 Preferences to make sure Auto-saving is switched on, and it is so where did the folder go? Where are my auto-save documents?
Answer: You might have guessed: there’s a fault in the Office 2011 Help file. Nowadays, the AutoRecovery-folder is located in an entirely different location on your Mac. The correct path is this: /Users/ username/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery But there is yet another tiny hurdle to get to it: in the current version of OSX, the user’s Library-folder is a hidden folder. So if you want to access it, the easiest way to do so is: – in the Finder, click on “Go” in the top menu bar – when the pulldown menu appears, press the ALT-key on your keyboard (a.k.a. OPTION-key) and an extra option named “Library” will appear in the pulldown menu – while holding the ALT-key, click on “Library” and your personal (hidden) Library-folder will open in the Finder – there you can navigate to Application Support–Microsoft–Office to find the “Office 2011 AutoRecovery”-folder you are looking for That’s it. ? Note: It is not clear if this problem is due to OSX 10.9 “Mavericks” or that it is occurring with all installations of Office 2011 for Mac. Either way, the solution is as mentioned above.
UPDATE: it turns out that there’s a bug in Excel 2011 for Mac: even though the Autosave does save a file with an.xlsx file extension, it’s not a true.xlsx file! Trying to open it will lead to an “Microsoft cannot open this file”-error. The solution is to change the file extension to either.xlsb (Excel binary format) or.xlb (older Excel backup format), to enable Excel to recognize the file and enable it to open. a big Thank You to Paul Preston for noticing this problem and for Bryan P for posting the solution on. AutoRecover only prompts when it was a previously SAVED version of a file. In Word2010 (I believe in 2007 as well), even if you have an UNSAVED document, and you have a computer failure (ie, power outage), there will still be a recovery file created, provided you have AutoRecover setup (see below).
NOTE: If you have an UNSAVED document that was lost, you will have to manually open it, you will NOT be prompted to recover it! In XP — Navigate to: C: Documents and Settings YOURUSERNAME Application Data Microsoft Word In it will be a bunch of.ASD files (hopefully). You are probably going to be looking for the one called AutoRecovery save of Document1.asd, but you can sort by date/time if you have multiples to find the latest one.
If there are NO.ASD files in this folder, make sure this is the folder it is set to save to. In your ribbon, click File, Options, Save and see if a) AutoRecover is checked and b) Where they are being saved to.
Hope this helps someone! UFlysoft Data Recovery. I experienced a similar problem. My Mac crashed this morning upon awakening. After the reboot, I was asked if I wanted to open the last saved version of the Excel file I had been working on. (I wasn’t given the opportunity to open an AutoRecovered version.) I chose yes, but the file that opened hadn’t captured any of the work I did yesterday.
I was able to navigate to the Office 2011 AutoRecovery folder. Inside I found a variety of Word docs, one as recent as today, but only one Excel file — from Nov 2013. I checked, and AutoRecover is set in Excel for 10 minutes. Any idea where else my Excel AutoRecover files might be hiding? Is there a way to search files (including these Autorecover files) by date? Can one search for the files with the ‘fake’.xlsx extension? Any help you can offer is greatly appreciated.
@Doug Williams: Thanks for the feedback! Sorry to hear about your troubles. To search for files within ALL files on your Mac, do this: – in the Finder (a.k.a. I had an issue with a Word doc saved multiple times on my mac, and then it literally disappeared. I just finished saving as then nothing. I searched through everything and even looked through the Library/ApplicationSupport/Microsoft folders only to discover the Office/Office 2011 folder didn’t even exist!
Yet I was clearly using the application suite. I used Terminal to discover if the file was ever recorded and low and behold, found a record of it in Library/ApplicationSupport/Microsoft/Office/Office2011 Autorecovery. I used your Go search tip to force it to look up Library/ApplicationSupport/Microsoft/Office (and hopefully, potentially re-map the pathway to Office).
Round about way but without your tips I would be losing it right now. @David: Thanks for the feedback. Sorry to hear about the loss of your (partner’s) PowerPoint documents. One issue you might have, is that you for any recovery version to be saved, it seems essential that you have a first version saved manually Hope this helps you prevent future loss Without any intention of being rude or objurgatory: – auto-saves by Time Machine backups might give an extra level of – manual ‘old school’ saves by just pressing the CMD + S key combo every time you stop typing for a few seconds might even be the most secure and time saving way of securing your ‘under construction’ work Good Luck! I’ve tried all of your suggestions to no avail. – in the Finder, click on “Go” in the top menu bar I did this – when the pulldown menu appears, press the ALT-key on your keyboard (a.k.a.
OPTION-key) and an extra option named “Library” will appear in the pulldown menu I did this but no extra option appeared PLEASE HELP ME. – while holding the ALT-key, click on “Library” and your personal (hidden) Library-folder will open in the Finder – there you can navigate to Application Support–Microsoft–Office to find the “Office 2011 AutoRecovery”-folder you are looking for. @Katherine Longwell: Sorry to hear you can’t find any autorecovery files. Aren’t you able to find the “Office 2011 AutoRecovery”-folder?
Or did you find the folder, but isn’t there anything in it? In case of the later, to prevent future loss, you should make sure you do not keep working in a new untiled document, as untitled documents may not be autosaved so, after starting a new Office document, make sure you ‘immediately’ save it manually, and only after that autosaves may be saved Hope this helps, to prevent future losses.
@Allyson: Sorry to hear you couldn’t find any autosaved PowerPoint files (yet?) Did you get the note saying there won’t be any autosaved files of any document entitled “Untitled”? It’s unclear why Microsoft decided on not autosaving “Untitled” documents, they might be under the assumption that as long as you don’t (re)name your document your document is not of big importance to you, but it’s something we have to live with (until Microsoft see the light) So are you sure you have made an initial Save of the PowerPoint presentation you are looking for? If not there’s no way of recovering your presentation that I know of If you did do that initial Save & Rename, there should be an auto recovered version of your presentation somewhere, and I might be able to help you find it Please let me know Good Luck! A little late perhaps, but I was working on a powerpoint recently and my Mac crashed. I last saved the document two days prior to the crash but had added information to the powerpoint since then. I cannot find any autosave files despite having auto-save activated prior to the crash. I’ve looked in the folder you mentioned and also looked in that same folder on Time Machine but to no avail.
There’s only a blank file that says powerpoint temp with no information in it. Any suggestions?
Or is this data lost forever? I was working on a file that was saved on a remote server that was accessed through VPN. PPT crashed, and when it automatically reopened only a very old version reopened. I tried the search suggested here for my local HD and did not find the autosave file. I tried searching “Shared” which is the server that the original document was saved on, but it’s just spinning forever saying “searching shared”. Is there any hope that a file saved on a remote server would have autorecovery files saved there or somewhere else on my local HD? Hi, I just lost my powerpoint which I spent the afternoon working on.
I’ve found the temporary file but I have two problems: 1. When I add an extension (.pptx or.ppt) the file tries to repair itself, then declares that it’s corrupted and refuses to open 2. On closer inspection, the last associated time on the info page was around the time I started working, not the time that I lost the work. Does that mean it hasn’t been working all along?
Interestingly, the last time this happened I hadn’t saved an official version – it was an untitled.pptx – and autorecovery worked perfectly. This time I had already saved it to my disk and now it seems to be lost forever ? I thought that autorecovery saved images of your slides too? Is that true? If so, where might I find these? Even if I have to retype some stuff it’s far easier than starting again from scratch thanks! @Charlotte: Sorry to hear you are running into a problem Maybe you’ve already solved this (sorry for my delayed reply), if not, can you please tell me what version of Office you are using and what version of MacOSX / OSX / macOS?
@Charlotte: UPDATE: the problem you are encountering might have to do with the fact that you are using Office 2016 instead of Office 2011 you can check which version of Excel you are using by clicking on the word “Excel” in the upper menu bar and then clicking on “About Excel” in the popup list; if you see “version 15.xx” in the “About Excel”-window that opens, you are running Office 2016 for Mac (not Office 2011 for Mac); in that case the solution to your problem can be found in this updated post: hope this helps ?. @Tamara Imperial: Thanks for the feedback. That’s odd to hear. Can you please tell me what version of Office you are using and what version of MacOSX / OSX / macOS?
I think you’re probably right, I recently updated it! My versions: macOS Sierra 10.12.3 and microsoft word 15.18 Are they too fresh and new? I did save the document, and remember clearly. It was an interview with answers and I remember saving it to use for my paper, and I accidentally saved my paper under the same name as the interview questions/answers and replaced them!! Okay well now that you have a run down of the situation and more info about my system I really hope you can point me in the right direction. Thank you so so much again! @Tamara Imperial: I think I have found the solution to your problem; there appears to be a new location of Word 15’s AutoRecovery in Office 2016 for Mac: /Users/username/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/ for PowerPoint 15 the location is: /Users/username/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.PowerPoint/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/ and for Excel 15 it is: /Users/username/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/ please send feedback on whether this was of any help ?.
Thank you so much for your guidance here, MacManus. I recently had a hair-raising failure Your guide worked for me, but needed some slight adjustment in my case, and I’d like to contribute to the knowledge base. @Silvia: Thanks for the feedback.