Shut down PC and Didn't save excel Doc, can it be recovered

[Boris]

A user shut down his computer last night without saving
some "important" excel document. His autorecover was set
to 5 minutes. How do I restore this document?

 

[Gord Dibben]

Boris

I doubt if he will find any backup to recover.

Autorecovery is not the same as "autosave", which overwrote the original at
timed increments.

When Excel closes, the autorecovery file is deleted unless Excel experiences a
problem.

He may be lucky using Start>Programs>MS Office Tools>MS Application Recovery.

See Help under "recover files".

Gord Dibben Excel MVP

 

[Dave Peterson]

When the user shut down his computer, did they do it gently--close all open
applications and then windows Start button|shutdown?

If no, then the autorecovery file should still be available. The user should be
prompted to find out what you want to do with that autorecovered file the next
time excel starts up.

But I bet Gord's anwer applies (because the user closed things nicely--just
forgot to save).

 

[Andrew]

I hope that someone proves me wrong but I don't think this is possible.

For some general information, you can backup Excel files by selectin
Save As from the File menu, then in the top right corner you will see
dropdown menu shown as Tools. Select General Options and then chec
"Always create backup".

This will create a backup for all new files, you can also overwrit
existing files

 

[Dave Peterson]

This is actually a setting for that particular workbook--not all new workbooks.
(The MSWord "equivalent" option is application wide, though.)

But you could create a nice template that has this setting.

Start a new workbook and format everything you want--page
headers/footers/orientation--everything.

Save it as book.xlt in your XLStart folder (use windows start button|Find/search
if you're not sure where this is).

And make sure you check the "always create backup" when you're saving.

Now every workbook that was created using this template will have this option
"pre-set".