where are the auto saved files for office 2016 for mac?

Anonymous
2015-03-10T02:57:37+00:00

I had autorecoveron (by default) and the app crashed (ironically when i tried to do a normal save). is there a chance i can get my file back and if so where?

this was a powerpoint presentation.

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Microsoft 365 and Office | PowerPoint | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2015-03-10T09:20:15+00:00

thanks for your reply.

I actually found my file - for reference it was at 

HD > Users > [my user name] > Library > Containers > com.microsoft.Powerpoint > Data > Library > Preferences > AutoRecovery > Presentation1_autorecover

but powerpoint wouldn't detect it upon restart, it wouldn't show up in spotlight etc. (I found it with a program called "find my file")

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Anonymous
2015-09-23T20:41:09+00:00

I had to rename the autosave file with a '.pptm' extension before PowerPoint would open it.

It appears the autosave has a content type of "application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.main+xml" instead of "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation.main+xml" which is typical for a pptx file.

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Anonymous
2015-03-13T22:04:01+00:00

I guess there's confusion over what type of file you were working on. If it was a Word document then everything in the path is the same except replace the word "PowerPoint" for "Word" and see if anything is in that folder.

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-10-10T04:47:17+00:00

    HD > Users > [my user name] > Library > Containers > com.microsoft.word > Data > Library > Preferences > AutoRecovery > Autorecovery of Document 1

    Is that for a PC? I can't find this on my mac. There is no folder 'containers' under library! Microsoft would not help me over the phone saying student version 2016 doesn't have phone tech support. And that there is not auto recovery file folder for 2016, only 2011 version. I need to recover a ppt I spent 4 hours of work on tonight. My ppt was set to autosave every 5 minutes. And it was autosaving but when it crashed, I opened that file and no work was showing saved whatsoever. Microsoft couldn't tell me what went wrong.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-09-30T17:44:58+00:00

    I found this post while searching for a lost Word document, and found it thanks to this. However, it would not open in Word, saying that the extension did not match the document type. It would not open in Pages or WordPad on Windows either. In case someone else is reading this post with the same problem, I was able to open it using TextEdit and copy/paste the contents out to recover.

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