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Due to the widespread use of Microsoft Office, we are accustomed to storing personal information, business data, or educational materials in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations. It is convenient to view such files from a computer hard drive, external hard drive, USB flash drive or any other storage medium. However, if you do not take care of the safety of these documents, then storing information in them can be risky.
In the end, accidental operations (such as deletion or formatting), viruses, software or hardware failures can lead to the loss of a document. The data often stored in lost documents is very important. That is why many users are interested in the question:How to recover a Word document?«.
In this article, we will consider several options for recovering a Word document: both using the functions built into Microsoft Word and using third-party data recovery programs.
A little about Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is probably the most popular program in the Microsoft Office suite, rivaled only by Microsoft Excel.
Just imagine, today a huge number of versions of Word for Windows have already been released: Microsoft Word 97, 2000, XP, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013 and finally Microsoft Word 2016. It’s not even immediately possible to remember which other program has such a long and successful history.
Word 2007 and Word 2010 were the most popular among other versions. But with the release of the latest version of Word 2016, which is gaining popularity, users are increasingly asking questions about how to restore a Word 2016 document. We’ll talk about this version of the program.
Autosave
Have you ever been in a situation where you accidentally closed a document that you have been working on for a long time without saving it? Or when the power went out while working on a document or the computer turned off for some other reason?
Most users, this situation leads to panic. Fortunately, Word 2016 has a built-in document autosave feature that makes it easy to restore the last autosaved version of a file. In Microsoft Office, this feature is enabled by default with an autosave time of 10 minutes, but this can be changed if desired.
To set this parameter, go to the menu File > Parameters > Preservation.
This function means that Word will automatically save the document after a specified period of time. And when the user accidentally closes the document without saving it, it will be possible to restore the last autosaved version of the file available in the specified auto-recovery directory (which can also be configured).
How Word AutoSave Works
The timer is activated after making any change to the document, as well as after automatic or manual saving. After the set time has elapsed, a new version of the file will be saved.
If you save the file by pressing the button Save (Shift+F12) or using the menu File > Save, the autosave timer will stop until the next changes are made to the file.
How to recover an unsaved Word document
Undo previous operation
When editing or making changes to Word documents, some users prefer to use a combination of Ctrl + Z or the undo arrow to undo the previous operation. This is a very convenient way to return a document to its previous state. But this method has a limited number of undo operations. Therefore, restoring the last saved version of a file would be the preferred recovery method.
How to recover an oversaved document
Click Menu File in the upper left corner, a window will open as in the previous image. Look in the section Document management, which lists all autosaved file versions, sorted by save time.
Just click on the version you want and it will open in a new window where you can choose Comparison (with the current file version) or Reestablish.
Of course, you can find the automatically saved versions of the file on your computer in the previously mentioned auto-recovery directory and, by double-clicking on the desired version of the file, repeat the procedure indicated in the previous paragraph.
How to recover an unsaved Word document
Worse, if you closed without saving a document in which many changes were made, in addition, previous autosaved versions on the tab File are not displayed. In this case, the only way to find the latest autosaved version of the file is to look in the folder on your computer where files are automatically saved.
If you don’t remember which folder was configured to automatically save Word files, then you can see the path to this directory in the Word options: File > Parameters > Preservation > AutoRecovery Data Directory. The autosaved version file has the format asd.
Once the desired file is found, simply double-click on it and open it with Word. The file will open in a new window where you can select Comparison (with the current file version) or Reestablish.
How to recover a deleted Word document
The document recovery methods described above are very convenient for Word users. But they will not work if the autosaved document file is lost as a result of a virus attack, disk formatting, or accidental deletion, or any other similar reason. And if the automatically saved file is missing, and the Word document is lost – what to do in such a situation?
You can use one of the Microsoft Office file recovery programs. For example, Hetman Office Recovery.
After downloading and installing Hetman Office Recovery, run the program and you will be prompted to select the drive from which you want to recover the file.
Double-click on the drive you want to recover the file from and follow the rest of the recovery wizard:
- Select the required type of analysis: Quick scan or Full analysis;
- Specify criteria for searching files: file type, size and date of creation (if necessary);
- Press Next.
After that, the program will scan your media and show the deleted files, which can be viewed using the preview and save the recovered files in a convenient way for you.
Now you know how to recover a Word document: unsaved or accidentally closed, accidentally deleted or lost as a result of a computer crash. Losing Word documents should no longer be a problem for you.