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
    2024-07-27T04:22:36+00:00

    I have a an Excel spreadsheet (.xlsm) saved to OneDrive that I keep open on my home PC. I update it multiple times per day and hit CTRL-S out of habit after every edit but also have AutoSave on. Today while I was at work my PC at home rebooted for some update or something and Excel reopened itself and was displaying my file, with current data, but as a .xlsb file, with a warning that my macros were dangerous and it didn't know where my file came from, and, more notably, NO option to enable macros. I figured it was just a glitchy opening so I closed the file and declined to save it because I know, of course, that my proper .xlsm file was still on OneDrive, but when I opened the .xlsm file was from 8 days ago with over a week of missing data.

    Fortunately, looking on here, I found the .xlsb file in my trash bin so I recovered it and just saved it as a .xlsm file over my original filename and I'm good now.

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  3. Tamer Tug 53,885 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-06-21T18:29:42+00:00

    hi,

    Dear friend here i am leaving you a link to help to solve your issue,

    Carefully follow the steps shown in the link finally you will get your issue solved.

    Can you please inform me after you apply thge steps and finish your process?

    Hre is the link,

    https://www.easeus.com/file-recovery/recover-temporary-excel-files-in-windows-10.html

    Good luck

    Regards

    Tamsa13

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-05-16T02:51:45+00:00

    Yes. I had emailed my boss a copy of it, so that was the only way. Other than that, i had to redo my whole entire work log.

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