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

Anonymous
2017-10-19T19:57:03+00:00

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:

  1. Document Recovery seems to be working for Word and PP.
  2. The settings in Options>Save are all the same for all Office products: currently set to AutoRecover every 1 minute.
  3. 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.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2019-01-29T16:59:09+00:00

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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  1. Anonymous
    2018-02-05T22:01:48+00:00

    Ditto here, running on a Macbook Pro.  Not only are there no autorecover files, but as best I can tell "Autosave"  is not available unless you choose to save remotely on Microsoft's OneDrive.  How stupid is that.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-01-31T21:02:18+00:00

    I am experiencing the same issue in Excel 2016 in Windows 10 (Autorecovery is set to 10 min, no exceptions) . I've just lost 2 weeks of important work.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-01-29T02:31:25+00:00

    I am piling on here, but I just lost 5 hours of work.  Why did Windows 10 crash/restart for no reason as I am working on the computer?  No idea.  Why was there no AutoSaved version of my spreadsheet in the recovered / autosaved files folder?  No idea.  This feature is ESSENTIAL and it does not work.  MSFT, you suck.  Please put someone on this who can figure it out and fix it.  You have known about it for months now.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-01-15T02:50:56+00:00

    I'm having an issue with autosave where I tell it to autosave to a particular location (not the default) but it continues to save to the default.  I opened a ticket with MS support. Not sure if that's related to the problems others are experiencing here.. have been able to reproduce this issue on 3 different computers with 3 different OS's in Excel or Word..

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