Autosave not working - no files are there

Probably a little late for many, but I just wanted to pass this along. It might be helpful to someone.

First, for Nicklas L, XLB files are Excel’s backup/AutoRecover workbooks. For more recent versions, XLSB is the extension.

Word saves its AutoRecover files as ASD, regardless of version, I think.

BUT--I think you have to access them through File | Open | Recover Unsaved Documents in the corresponding app.

On my system, Word and Excel 2013, when I click on File | Open | Recover Unsaved Documents, nothing is there. Both Word and Excel go to this folder if I click on Recover Unsaved Documents …

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles\

… but there are no unsaved documents there. (This is in the application data Local folder.)

But if I click on Recover Unsaved Documents in Word and then manually navigate to this folder …

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Word\

… that is actually where they are, each one in its own folder with cryptic names. (This is in the application data Roaming folder.) I can then find and open both unsaved and autosaved documents. I just have to figure out the names, which is not that hard.

Likewise, if I click on Recover Unsaved Documents in Excel and then manually navigate to the following folder, I can then find and open the unsaved and autosaved workbooks …

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Excel\

… though they're also in folders with cryptic names.

To see what would happen, I tried changing the AutoRecover file location option in Word to a different folder. However, Word continued to save AutoRecover documents in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Word. To be fair, Word also saved an AutoRecover copy in the new location, but as soon as Word closed normally, it disappeared. (If Word crashed, it remained.) So using a different location doesn’t seem worthwhile.

I tried changing the AutoRecover file location option in Excel to a folder I created, but it didn’t make any difference. Excel continued to save AutoRecover files in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Excel\ and put nothing in the new location.

I agree that this doesn't really appear to be a very good design. I get the impression that this is a transitional process that (I hope) someday will work the way it is supposed to.

On another subtopic, when I tested the timing in Word, with the interval set at 3 minutes, it consistently saved after 5 minutes, which is not very friendly of it.

All Microsoft products I encounter are completely unstable. Indeed they are the number one cause for efficiency disruption in my company. I am genuinely starting to believe that the next global economic boom will be founded upon the withdrawal of use of Microsoft applications. They have been slowly going downhill for years; removing useful tools, becoming more and more unreliable, not being able to cope with large amounts of data, crashing at an ever growing rate. Data loss in excel has just happened to me with 0 recovery or autosave files in the name of that document???

Any suggestions Microsoft ?  I've the same issue, not worked on an excel file for half an hour, Windows 10 crashes (again.... on both my computers windows 10 is less stable than earlier versions of windows ).  when I restart the computer and Excel the document recovery pane only has the the file I saved an hour before.  Autosave is set to every 10 minutes - but where is it? I've looked in the autosave file location too and there is nothing there.

I am so flipping angry right now.

I've been working on a spreadsheet for 2 weeks.  About a week ago, my PC crashed and when I got back into excel the last save on the document was several days old.  The file was being stored and worked on through my OneDrive account (since Windows 10 seems to think that's my default document store).

I have a habit of periodically using the "file > save" option while working so there should have been a save that was less than an hour old.  

I searched the folder where autosave documents are supposed to be stored and the only file was the one from several days earlier.

I lost 3 days of work.

I started again after that incident and have been fastidiously saving the document manually all week.  Instead of saving on OneDrive I intentionally changed the storage path to the local PC in the normal My Documents folder in my user profile.

Before going to bed last night I saved the file and closed Excel.  I've been working this file every evening and have had no issues opening and closing it.

This morning when I went to open the file I can find no trace of any edits since July 3rd... the date of my original issues.

All the work I've done for nearly 2 weeks is gone and I can't find any evidence that I've actually worked on a file.

Thank god this is just a pet project I've been doing and not a work-related task... I'd be up the creek without a paddle. 

My computer did not shutdown / reboot or do a restore function between the time I went to bed and the time I woke up.

Other apps that were left open were still running and I see no evidence in the event viewer that anything like that occurred. 

I ran Office 2013 Pro for several years without issue and now that I'm using Office 2016 Pro I'm having problems.  I'm glad I spent the money for this POS product.

same problem, windows 10, office 2013, one of our users spent several hours on a word document, autosave set to 10 minute s, no trace anywhere of the saved file, only the original file was left on server, and our snapshot on the server only had the original documents

Searched for any files changed today and after a while I found a .asd file. It seems we managed to recover it via the "file", "open document" and the "Recover unsaved documents" at the bottom of all recent documents". 

This seems like a bug to me.