Urgent: Microsoft Office Reinstallation Followed by Loss of Word, Excel and PowerPoint Documents

Dear Microsoft Support,

I am requesting urgent assistance regarding a serious issue that occurred while resolving a Microsoft 365 installation problem on my MacBook.

I was experiencing an "Unknown Error (0x0)" when launching Microsoft Word and Excel. Following advice from Microsoft Support and the Microsoft Q&A forum, I removed Microsoft Office from my Mac and reinstalled it using the latest version downloaded from the Mac App Store.

After successfully reinstalling Microsoft 365, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are now working correctly. However, I subsequently discovered that ALL of my Office documents have disappeared.

The situation is as follows:

• The folder structure within my Documents folder is still present.
• Most PDF files remain intact.
• Many folders that previously contained Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents are now empty.
• Some folders contain only Microsoft temporary lock files (for example, files beginning with ~$), while the actual Office documents are missing.
• Spotlight, Finder rebuilds, and macOS indexing have not restored the missing files.
• Terminal searches confirm that many recent Office documents are no longer present.
• There are no Time Machine backups or local APFS snapshots available.
• Microsoft Word AutoRecovery folders do not contain recoverable copies.

These missing documents represent many years of professional work, including regulatory submissions, business documentation, presentations and other critical files.

I would appreciate your assistance with the following:

1. Is there any known issue where uninstalling or reinstalling Microsoft 365 on macOS could result in Office documents disappearing while PDFs remain?
2. Are there any Microsoft 365 caches, recovery folders, or cloud locations that I should check which may still contain these documents?
3. Can Microsoft provide any diagnostic steps or tools to determine what happened to these files?
4. Is there any possibility that the missing documents can be recovered through Microsoft 365 or Office recovery mechanisms?

I have already carried out extensive troubleshooting, including:

• Reinstalling Microsoft 365.
• Rebuilding Spotlight indexing.
• Checking AutoRecovery locations.
• Checking iCloud Drive.
• Running First Aid in Disk Utility.
• Using Terminal to search for the missing documents.

Unfortunately, the Office documents remain missing.

This is a critical issue affecting a substantial amount of business data, and I would appreciate any assistance or escalation that Microsoft can provide.

Kind regards,