Autosave not working - no files are there

I'm still using Office 2013, so it might not work the same way, but refer to my posts of Oct. 27 and Nov. 15 2017. You might find files in one of the referenced locations even if they are not visible via Excel (or Word).

I found that I still sometimes have to hunt for autosave/autorecover documents in several different places. Other times, they show up in Backstage view or in the recovery panel. I haven't had time to figure out what the pattern is.

Good luck!

It happened again.  I work on my spreadsheet for 1hr.  Take a 20 min nap and come back to it and work for 5 min then the damn thing crashes.  Open up excel and nothing recovered and nothing saved anywhere.  It opens the last version saved from yesterday.  This is useless!!  Why cant this damn program just SAVE AUTOMATICALLY!!  I wasted 1hr of work time.  I have to redo everything again.  its 2018 its time everything gets saved automatically.  Hard drive space is no longer an issue. SAVE SAVE SAVE.  OF COURSE WE WANT THINGS SAVED WHY ELSE WOULDN'T WE!!  This auto recover crap doesnt even work so just make this damn app to save woek all the time..  i shouldn't have to remember to save anymore.  When does anyone work on a spreadsheet and not want it saved??!!

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.

Thanks vkrlc!  I've now found that some files are automatically being saved, in the location you indicated.  Which, of course, is not where they're supposed to be saved.  Mine is set to autosave every 4 minutes, but it looks like it's doing it every 11-12 minutes.  One of the Excel files I've had open for a while has not been autosaved, but then I haven't changed it either, so perhaps that makes a difference.

I happen to have this exact problem as well. I am using Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 and of recent I am constantly- always as a matter- of fact plagued with this problem. This also is always followed by me not being able to save any spreadsheets at all. Whenever I attempt to save the program goes non responsive and everything is lost. I really need some help on this issue urgently as I rely on spreadsheets alot.

This has happened to me twice now. I have a habit of manually saving via the save icon at the top left of the screen (as well as CTRL + S). Autosave was also set to save every 10min. Despite both methods of saving, about 3-5hrs of work was lost.

After ensuring my files were saving to the correct location, I opened a new workbook for a different project (several days later) and tried again, figuring my computer was just being dumb. Excel crashed again, saving only the original version of my workbook. Luckily only 2hrs of work was lost, but at this point I'm starting to feel like no method of saving will prevent hours of wasted time. The microsoft excel recovery folder did not save my workbook (I triple checked, looking for the correct folder a myriad of ways).

Now, I have changed the default location to the OneDrive and synced that with my user documents folder, in addition to changing the autosave time to every 1 minute (not that that will do anything). I'm going to uninstall and reinstall 365 and see what happens.