How to Recover an Unsaved or Lost Excel File
Recover an unsaved Excel workbook from the Document Recovery pane, Recover Unsaved Workbooks, the AutoRecover folder, or OneDrive version history.
Close a crashed spreadsheet the wrong way and hours of work can seem to vanish, but Excel almost always keeps a copy somewhere. Which recovery route works depends mostly on one thing: whether the file was ever saved. If Excel crashed, look for the Document Recovery pane the next time you open the app; if you closed a brand-new workbook without ever saving it, use File > Info > Manage Workbook > Recover Unsaved Workbooks; if you saved over good data in a file on OneDrive, version history can roll it back.
Start here: match the symptom to the fix
Before clicking anything, work out which situation you are in. Reopening Excel and starting fresh, or saving a new file over the old name, can bury the very copy you need. Find your symptom below, then jump to that section.
| Symptom | Where to look | What you get back |
|---|---|---|
| Excel or the PC crashed with the file open | Document Recovery pane on next launch | The last AutoRecover snapshot, up to one interval old |
| You closed a new workbook and clicked “Don’t Save” | File > Info > Manage Workbook > Recover Unsaved Workbooks | The unsaved .xlsb copy, held about four days |
| You saved over the right numbers | File > Info > Version History (OneDrive or SharePoint only) | An earlier cloud version you can restore |
| The saved file was deleted from the disk | Recycle Bin, then file-recovery tools | The original file, if it was not overwritten |
If Excel crashed: the Document Recovery pane
When Excel or Windows closes unexpectedly, Excel does the first step for you. The next time you open the app, Microsoft’s Document Recovery guide explains that “Document Recovery automatically opens to help you get your file back,” listing the files you had open that were recovered from the most recent save. Each entry shows a date and time so you can tell an AutoRecover copy from the version you last saved by hand.
Select the file with the newest timestamp to open it, compare it against what you remember, then use File > Save As to write it to a real folder with a real name. The recovered item in the pane is temporary, so do not rely on it staying there. This route only works if AutoRecover was on while you worked and it managed to write at least one snapshot, which is why the interval setting below matters. If the pane never appears, close it and move to the manual methods.
If you closed without saving: Recover Unsaved Workbooks
This is the classic case: a scratch workbook you never named, closed in a hurry with “Don’t Save.” Excel quietly keeps a copy anyway. Open a blank workbook, then go to File > Info, select Manage Workbook, and choose Recover Unsaved Workbooks. A File Explorer window opens straight into the folder that holds these drafts, each saved as an .xlsb file. Click the Date modified column to sort newest first, open the one you want, and use the Save As prompt in the yellow notification bar to keep it for good.
A shortcut to the same place is File > Open > Recent, then the Recover Unsaved Workbooks button at the very bottom of the recent list. One honest limit: this folder only holds workbooks that were never saved to a real location. A file you had saved at least once will not appear here; for that, use an AutoRecover snapshot or version history instead. The same set of tools exists for Word, covered step by step in recovering an unsaved Word document.
Where the files actually live
When the menus fail, you can dig into the folders directly. Excel uses two separate locations, and mixing them up is why people give up too early. AutoRecover snapshots of files you have already saved land in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\, while the drafts behind the Recover Unsaved Workbooks button sit in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles. Paste either path into the File Explorer address bar, swapping in your account name, and sort by date.
Unsaved drafts are generally held for about four days before Excel clears them, though Microsoft does not put that number in writing, and a restart or a pile of newer files can shorten it. Treat anything in these folders as a copy to rescue today, not a backup to leave sitting. If Excel keeps locking up rather than crashing outright, sorting out the underlying Excel not responding problem first will stop you from generating half-written recovery files in the first place.
If you overwrote good data: version history
AutoRecover cannot help when the file saved correctly but with the wrong contents, for instance when you deleted a sheet and saved, or someone else edited your numbers. The fix is version history, and it has one firm requirement: Microsoft states that “version history in Microsoft 365 only works for files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint.” If the workbook lives on the cloud, select its name in the title bar at the top of the window and choose Version history; on Office 2021 the same option sits under File > Info > Version History.
Each saved state appears in a pane on the right with its time and author. Select one to open it in a separate window so you can check it without touching the live file, then choose Restore to promote it to the current version. Per Microsoft’s version history documentation, a personal Microsoft account keeps “the last 25 versions,” while a work or school account depends on how the library is configured. If the saved file was deleted from the disk entirely rather than overwritten, that is a different rescue, covered in recover deleted files on Windows.
Turn on AutoSave and tighten AutoRecover
Recovery is a scramble; the settings below turn the next incident into a non-event. AutoSave and AutoRecover are not the same tool. AutoRecover is a local safety net that writes a snapshot on a timer and only surfaces after a crash. Open File > Options > Save and confirm that Save AutoRecover information every [10] minutes is checked, along with Keep the last AutoRecovered version if I close without saving. The default interval is 10 minutes, but the box accepts any value from 1 to 120; dropping it to 1 or 2 minutes means a crash costs seconds of work rather than a coffee break’s worth.
AutoSave is the stronger option, but it only works when the file is stored on OneDrive or SharePoint with an active Microsoft 365 subscription. Save the workbook to OneDrive, then flip the AutoSave toggle in the top-left corner to on; it turns blue and writes every change to the cloud within seconds, feeding the version history above. If the toggle is gray, the file is saved locally or to an unsupported spot. The single habit that makes all of this reliable is saving new workbooks to OneDrive the moment you create them, before there is anything worth losing.