Autosave not working - no files are there

The same thing has happened to me. But I had actually saved manually many times between "the last saved version" that excel had and the time it crashed.

I see two VERY SERIOUS problems:

1- You cannot have a program that crashes every second day. I have a new SurfacePro with the new Windows10 Pro. My laptop is less than one month old yet my old Mac (that is over 10 years old) is much more reliable. With this new system my office suite (mostly excel, word and powerpoint) crash relatively regularly. This should not be happening.

If I do not see any changes soon I will have to revert back to Mac. 

2- Your system should save the documents it says it saved. Whether you are using auto recover and especially if you are saving manually.

It seems that I am not the only one with this problem.

I was also very disappointed as I tried to contact support through the Microsoft website and this also crashed. I am denoting a pattern.

I look forward to receiving a prompt response from Microsoft in reference to these problems.

I have the same issue on my home computer. Note that periodically the files will revert back to disabling the autosave... so even though I uncheck that box that says to "disable autosave for this file only", then save my change, I have found that it keeps getting "checked"/disabled again by Microsoft , possibly when windows is updated with security patches or etc.

One thing I discovered that helped "solve" the problem is that certain Excel files have a box checked in the Options settings that prevents it from being Autosaved.

Options --> Save --> uncheck box that says, "Disable AutoRecover for this workbook only" --> OK

This was something that most of my inherited files had checked and why there was never a AutoRecover version for me to re-open. Thought I could just uncheck the box on each of these existing files when opened but today after a crash I discovered that the box was checked for a couple of files I created myself.  I have no idea if this results from a MS glitch or if it is from something my employer's IT group sets as default when installing the Office suite. It's certainly nothing I would have done myself.

In any event, this tip may help you save precious work as it has done for me - but you'll have to be diligent about checking this for each individual Excel file, including those created by you - and remember to save the file after making the change.

...  Also the manual save does not work UNLESS YOU CLOSE THE PROGRAM.  If you have been manually pressing the save button and your computer or excel crashes, or the computer is shutdown without closing Excel you WILL lose your files and be forced back to an earlier version of the file that was saved the last time the program was shut down properly. ...

I know you and others have reported this problem, but I have not experienced it. I simulated it by creating a workbook and manually saving changes to it. Each time, in File Explorer, the workbook's date-modified changed. Then I used Task Manager to kill the Excel process without allowing it to shut down normally, and the workbook still had all my saved changes. I went through the same process both on my local (C:) drive and on a network drive.

All I'm saying, though, is there must be some other factor that is causing yours to fail. I wonder how our systems are different.

I am having the same issue.  Also the manual save does not work UNLESS YOU CLOSE THE PROGRAM.  If you have been manually pressing the save button and your computer or excel crashes, or the computer is shutdown without closing Excel you WILL lose your files and be forced back to an earlier version of the file that was saved the last time the program was shut down properly.  At my company we have lost 30-40 hours worth of combined work due to this issue.  Most recently this morning when (having manually saved my spreadsheet repeatedly) a Windows update tried to run and crashed my computer.  I have auto-recover set to create a recovery file every 5 minutes.  When I rebooted everything was gone and the only file available was the one created yesterday.  PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE get this fixed.