Four Ways to Recover “Lost” Work in Microsoft Word
There’s nothing worse than losing an hour or two of hard work simply by pressing the wrong button or key in Microsoft Word—a mistake that causes your carefully crafted document (or a significant portion of it) to disappear right before your eyes.
Losing your work isn’t just a matter of a random error. Perhaps you were simply unlucky enough to be at your computer when the power went out—and with it, your desktop, Microsoft Word, and unsaved work.
However, before starting all over again, there are a few tricks you can try to get your work back on track.
Use the Undo button (Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z)
Sometimes all you need is the undo command: press Ctrl+Z (Windows) or Cmd+Z (macOS) to undo your last action in Word. This might be all you need to restore an accidentally deleted table or bring back that huge block of text you moved to the clipboard and lost track of.
This won’t save you from a power outage or restore all actions (for example, it won’t restore a closed file). However, it will often work if you make a mistake, and Word always keeps a record of your last 100 actions in the app, so you can go back quite a long way.
In the upper left corner of the Word interface, there’s also an “Undo” button: click it to reverse your last action, or click the arrow next to it to see a list of previous actions and select the one you want to revert to. To the right of the “Undo” button is the “Redo” button, which works similarly, but in reverse.
Open previous versions of files
Word also has a file version history feature that can be used to recover lost work: it essentially saves past versions of a document at regular intervals, allowing you to go back in time and even to the moment the file was created. It’s like a super undo that works even after restarting the application.
In Word for Windows, you can find older versions of a document by going to File > Info > Version History . On macOS, you can do this by going to File > View Version History . A sidebar will open on the right with all available previous versions, along with the date and time they were saved.
There’s one caveat, though: for this feature to work correctly, the document must be saved in the cloud (in OneDrive). If you’re working with a local file saved only on your computer and attempting to access version history, you’ll be prompted to save it to OneDrive (which will activate version history).
Find unsaved documents on your computer.
Word periodically saves files temporarily on your computer, so if the program suddenly freezes, the next time you start Word, an AutoRecover dialog box should appear asking if you want to recover the old file. If not, you can view partially saved files by clicking File > Info > Manage Document > Recover Unsaved Documents .
However, this only applies to Windows—if you use macOS, you rely on the AutoRecover process. Word for Windows and macOS allows you to configure how often AutoRecover files are saved: go to File > Options > Save (Windows) or Word > Preferences > Save (macOS). The default is every 10 minutes, but you can change this if needed.
If your file still isn’t showing up, try checking your temporary cache folder manually. In Windows, this is located in “C:\Users\”.
\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word” or “C:\Users\
\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles.” On macOS, try “/Users/”
/Library/Containers/com.Microsoft/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery” – add your user name where necessary.
Save your work in the cloud.
These days, Microsoft Word typically offers to save your work to OneDrive. This offers many benefits, including the aforementioned version history feature and the ability to collaborate on documents with other users. It also enables another convenient feature: AutoSave.
This is exactly what the name implies: every time you make changes to your document, they are quickly synced to the cloud. You’ll see an “Autosave” button in the upper left corner of the active document, and the document name at the top of the application window will indicate that saving is in progress.
If Word or your computer freezes, your work should be safe. AutoSave is enabled by default for files saved to OneDrive, but you can customize this behavior by going to File > Options > Save (in Windows) or Word > Preferences > Save ( in macOS).