Lost several day's worth of work in an Excel file?

Anonymous
2023-09-11T07:06:01+00:00

I opened, edited and saved a file in Excel several times last week without issue. This included adding a new sheet, then editing it over several days.

The file is in my work account's OneDrive.

Today I opened that same file to find that all my recent work (the whole sheet) has vanished; it seems to now be a version from 2 months ago, according to the last saved date. So naturally there is nothing in version history, and I cannot find any way to check for unsaved recent changes, but in any case, it was saved and opened again several times last week without issue, so I wouldn't expect unsaved recent changes to contain anything except perhaps the most recent edit.

How is this even possible!! Is there any way to recover the many hours of work I have lost?

My device is Windows 11, I have a personal account and a work account on the machine (and I have checked; it wasn't saved in my personal OneDrive).

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | Other | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-11-25T02:32:08+00:00

    For those who suddenly got their data cleared and saved it in the drive, recovery is not an option, you can recover your data by accessing the version history and recovering from the time of your last edit. I hope this works!

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-10-16T03:15:57+00:00

    POSSIBLE SOLUTION!
    I had something similar, although not exactly... Hopefully this will help someone...

    I was editing an Excel file that's saved on SharePoint on my desktop. Saved multiple times while editing. Next day I opened same file on Laptop, the version that I saw, was several hours behind. I didn't realize it at first and started editing the file and saving it.

    When I opened the file on the desktop again, it opened the version that was saved from the laptop and showed me the "Unsaved Changes" tab, with the message "Some of your unsaved changes can't be displayed here".

    I tried looking at the Version History and in "Recover Unsaved Workbooks", as suggested by MS support, but it wasn't there.

    Here's what worked:

    1. Click File -> History
    2. To the right of the History tab, there is a small panel with 3 icons. In the top right, click the icon "Unsaved Changes"
    3. At the bottom of the Unsaved Changes tab, there's a button "Open Backup" If you click it, it will pull the unsaved version.
    4. Save the doc with a different name and merge changes if needed manually.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-09-15T16:11:33+00:00

    I faced this same issue today. I lost few months of data that I worked on. It's stupidly ridiculous and I have lost my trust in this stupid piece of advertisement agency this stupid organization has become. Freaking garbage

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-09-02T15:11:58+00:00

    FWIW, the same thing has just happened to me, and not for the first time. I have a file that I update with financial information every month and it has just reverted back to a version from over one year ago. For me it is a minor issue, but it has really eroded my trust in Microsoft. I'll try migrating to Google sheets

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-08-23T14:59:23+00:00

    You're never too old to learn anything, Linux has some really good user friendly setups. Would recommend it on a separate machine though.

    https://www.debugpoint.com/linux-distro-beginners/

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