How to Recover Unsaved Documents in Word: Video Lesson
This video lesson, titled “Word 2019 and 365 Tutorial Recovering Unsaved Documents Microsoft Training,” shows how to recover unsaved documents in Word. This video lesson is from our complete Word tutorial, titled Mastering Word Made Easy™.
Overview:
Word lets you to attempt to recover unsaved document files. To see if Word automatically saved a copy of an unsaved document on which you were working, select the “File” tab in the Ribbon. Then click the “Open” command at the left side of the backstage view.
In the area to the right of the command panel, select the “Recent” command. Then look at the bottom of the pane that appears to the far-right. You should see a “Recover Unsaved Documents” button at the very bottom of the “Recent” section. Click this button to launch an “Open” dialog box that shows any copies of unsaved documents Word recovered. It may help to sort the files that appear in the “Open” dialog box by the “Date modified” column to show the list of recoverable files by date, because the file names won’t help you determine their content.
Next, choose the copy to recover in the list and then click the “Open” button in the “Open” dialog box to reopen the recovered copy. If you successfully retrieve the contents of the file, you should save the file that you recovered!
Instructions on How to Recover an Unsaved Word Document:
- To try to recover an unsaved document in Word, click the “File” tab in the Ribbon.
- Then click the “Open” command at the left side of the backstage view.
- Then select the “Recent” command to the right, if necessary.
- Next, click the “Recover Unsaved Documents” button at the bottom of the section in the far-right panel to launch an “Open” dialog box that shows any copies of unsaved documents Word has recovered.
- Choose the copy to recover from the list and then click the “Open” button in the “Open” dialog box to reopen the recovered copy.
- If you successfully retrieve the contents of the document, save the file you recovered!