How to Recover an Unsaved or Deleted Word or Excel Document

You closed without saving, Word crashed, or you deleted the wrong file — and hours of work seem gone. In most cases it isn’t. Office and your operating system quietly keep safety copies, and deleted files linger until they’re overwritten. Here’s how to get your document back.

If you never saved it (crash or accidental “Don’t Save”)

Office’s AutoRecover / AutoSave is your first stop.

Word or Excel (Windows):

1. Reopen the app. If a Document Recovery pane appears on the left, your file is probably there — open it and save it immediately.
2. If not, go to File → Info → Manage Document (Word) / Manage Workbook (Excel) → Recover Unsaved Documents/Workbooks. This opens the folder of unsaved drafts (.asd/.xlsb files).
3. Still nothing? Browse to the AutoRecover folder directly (typically C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word or ...\Excel) and look for .asd or .tmp files, or search your drive for *.asd / ~*.tmp.

Word or Excel (Mac): open File → Open Recent → Recover Unsaved Documents, or look in ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery.

Going forward, turn on AutoSave (Microsoft 365 with OneDrive) so this can’t happen again.

If you saved it but then deleted it

The file exists somewhere — work through these in order:

• Recycle Bin (Windows) / Trash (Mac) — the obvious first check.
• OneDrive / SharePoint — if the file lived in a synced folder, check the online Recycle Bin and Version history (right-click the file online → Version history). This also recovers earlier versions if you saved over your work.
• Previous Versions (Windows) — right-click the folder → Restore previous versions, if File History or restore points are on.
• Time Machine (Mac) — restore the file or folder from a backup.
• Backups — any cloud or external backup you keep.

If the file is corrupted (won’t open, or opens as gibberish)

• Use Open and Repair: in Word/Excel, File → Open → browse to the file → click the arrow next to the Open button → Open and Repair.
• Try opening it on a different machine or a different Office version.
• For Excel, try importing the data into a new blank workbook, or opening it in Google Sheets or LibreOffice, which sometimes recover what Excel won’t.

When the drive itself is the problem

All of the above assumes your computer works. If the document is trapped on a drive that failed, won’t mount, or was formatted, software on that machine can’t reach it — and running scans on a failing drive can make things worse. That’s a recovery job: the drive is imaged and the files are pulled from the copy.

The bottom line

Check AutoRecover for unsaved files; check the Recycle Bin, OneDrive version history, and backups for deleted ones; use Open and Repair for corruption. Turn on AutoSave so it doesn’t happen again.

If the file is on a failed or formatted drive, our document recovery service recovers Word, Excel, and PDF files for one flat price — and you pay nothing unless we succeed.