Document Recovery ( AutoRecover ) is not working for Excel 2016. System: Windows 8.1 64 bit Microsoft Excel 2016 MSO (16.0.8528.2126) 64 bit No fix even after a full Online repair of Office 2016 and, of course, all possible Office Updates. After working for hours on several Excel documents (which had previously been saved with a file name etc.), the power went out in our building. When the power was restored and Excel reopened, I was presented with the expected list of Recovered Documents on the left side. HOWEVER, every single one of these were simply "the Original version" or "the version last saved by user" (something like that). Meaning they did not contain ANY new data that had been entered since the last time I had saved them/reopened them despite the AutoRecover being set to 1 minute. NOTES : Document Recovery seems to be working for Word and PP. The settings in Options>Save are all the same for all Office products: currently set to AutoRecover every 1 minute. The ...AppData>Roaming>Microsoft>Excel folder contains no backup file/folder for new or reopened Excel Documents. Thank goodness, the AutoRecover does seem to be updating the equivalent folder for Word ("AutoRecovery save of DocumentX.asd" files get updated) and PowerPoint (the "pptXXX.tmp" file also updated). Edit: This is obviously some MSOffice Bug. Of the multiple 'test' spreadsheets I've been playing around with to study this, exactly 1 of them seems to actually back up. But absolutely no other ones and none of my previously created sheets ever backup to AutoRecover.

I'll add to the growing chorus here. Working on Mac (OS 10.13.3) with Excel for Mac version 16.10. Most current versions of the app and OS. Lost multiple hours of Excel work despite having manually saved several times and having AutoRecover enabled at every 10 minutes. The fact that manually saved changes were also lost is particularly disconcerting.

It's not working in the Mac! Menu/Excel/Preferences/Save/ Save AutoRecover info every XX minutes. Excel crash 2 times a hours... and doesn't make any recover data! OK we can save Control+S every 5 minutes, but thats not the way of working! The stability of the program is a minimum. Just buy this year the new Office package. But I have a lot of craches on my MAC.

I just got a new desktop for work. It seems to be Auto recovering intermittently. Definitely not every 20 minutes or 5 minutes like I've had it set to, but at least every hour. There's a lot that can be lost in an hour, but it's better than nothing i suppose... I have to go in to each Excel workbook and uncheck "Disable auto recovery for this workbook only" bs for it to do it. And I've started saving a copy of my extremely important files to OneDrive while i'm working on it to see if it does in fact autosave. So I guess we'll see if it works!

I just experienced this today and the frustration and anger I have for MS right now is beyond words! What are you doing about this?? Can we get an intelligent explanation for this instead of your robotic nonsense canned responses, please!!

Excel 2016 AutoRecover not working - NO files being saved to the AutoRecover File location

Anonymous

Document Recovery (AutoRecover) is not working for Excel 2016.

System:

Windows 8.1 64 bit

Microsoft Excel 2016 MSO (16.0.8528.2126) 64 bit

No fix even after a full Online repair of Office 2016 and, of course, all possible Office Updates.

After working for hours on several Excel documents (which had previously been saved with a file name etc.), the power went out in our building. When the power was restored and Excel reopened, I was presented with the expected list of Recovered Documents on the left side. HOWEVER, every single one of these were simply "the Original version" or "the version last saved by user" (something like that).

Meaning they did not contain ANY new data that had been entered since the last time I had saved them/reopened them despite the AutoRecover being set to 1 minute.

NOTES:

Document Recovery seems to be working for Word and PP.
The settings in Options>Save are all the same for all Office products: currently set to AutoRecover every 1 minute.
The ...AppData>Roaming>Microsoft>Excel folder contains no backup file/folder for new or reopened Excel Documents. Thank goodness, the AutoRecover does seem to be updating the equivalent folder for Word ("AutoRecovery save of DocumentX.asd" files get updated) and PowerPoint (the "pptXXX.tmp" file also updated).

Edit: This is obviously some MSOffice Bug. Of the multiple 'test' spreadsheets I've been playing around with to study this, exactly 1 of them seems to actually back up. But absolutely no other ones and none of my previously created sheets ever backup to AutoRecover.

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Answer accepted by question author

Anonymous

I finally found the right location of the autorecovery files for Mac users of Excel!

See: this post on this forum

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94 additional answers

Anonymous

2018-03-04T19:39:40+00:00

I'll add to the growing chorus here. Working on Mac (OS 10.13.3) with Excel for Mac version 16.10. Most current versions of the app and OS. Lost multiple hours of Excel work despite having manually saved several times and having AutoRecover enabled at every 10 minutes. The fact that manually saved changes were also lost is particularly disconcerting.
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Anonymous

2018-03-03T14:34:41+00:00

It's not working in the Mac!

Menu/Excel/Preferences/Save/

Save AutoRecover info every XX minutes.

Excel crash 2 times a hours... and doesn't make any recover data!

OK we can save Control+S every 5 minutes, but thats not the way of working!

The stability of the program is a minimum.

Just buy this year the new Office package. But I have a lot of craches on my MAC.
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Anonymous

2018-02-28T18:15:28+00:00

I just got a new desktop for work. It seems to be Auto recovering intermittently. Definitely not every 20 minutes or 5 minutes like I've had it set to, but at least every hour. There's a lot that can be lost in an hour, but it's better than nothing i suppose...

I have to go in to each Excel workbook and uncheck "Disable auto recovery for this workbook only" bs for it to do it. And I've started saving a copy of my extremely important files to OneDrive while i'm working on it to see if it does in fact autosave. So I guess we'll see if it works!
Was this answer helpful?

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Anonymous

2018-02-28T15:10:20+00:00

I just experienced this today and the frustration and anger I have for MS right now is beyond words! What are you doing about this?? Can we get an intelligent explanation for this instead of your robotic nonsense canned responses, please!!
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