Jul 07, 2017 Step by step tutorial on how to recover in case you have accidentlly clicked ' Don't save' in a Microsoft word 2016/2013/2010/2007 document. Microsoft Word On Mac. Recover Accidentally. Jun 12, 2019 If you are in similar situations, we have the solutions for you. In this article, we will introduce all the fixes on Mac word document recovery, no matter you want to recover unsaved Word document on Mac, or restore lost even retrieve a previous version of Word document on mac in Microsoft Office 2011, 2016 or Office 2019. Dec 15, 2017 After you have saved your word file and exited Microsoft Word, the possibilities of recovering a deleted or lost file are negligible. If you accidentally delete a vital word document that you wish to recover or you have lost your data due to faulty disk, there are a few options that you can exploit to get your files back.
In this article, you will learn 4 effective ways to recover unsaved, lost and deleted Word document on Mac with detailed steps: [1]recover with AutoRecovery; [2]Recover from Temp folder; [3]Recover from Recovered item in Trash; [4]recover with Word file recovery software.
Accidentally closed Word without saving on Mac? Do you know how to recover unsaved Word documents on Mac? According to the unique features of Microsoft Word for Mac, you may find the unsaved item in the AutoRecovery folder, Temporary folder or Recovered item in Trash. Besides, if you unintentionally lost, deleted or formatted your Word document, you can recover a Word document on Mac with EaseUS Word file recovery software.
Workable Solutions | Step-by-step Troubleshooting |
---|---|
Recover Unsaved Word Document | #1. Recover from the AutoRecovery folder..Full steps |
Recover Deleted Word Document | #4. Recover with Word file recovery software..Full steps |
Embedded with more useful features in certain collaborative situations than Pages, Microsoft Word becomes increasingly popular among Mac computers. Office 365 even allows users to create Word files on their Mac. On one hand, Microsoft Word offers standard DOC or DOCX file formats that are compatible in almost every OS platform; On the other hand, Word 2020, 2019, 2018..2011 is featured with auto-saving, which enables us to recover a Word document before we could hit Save.
Based on the features of Microsoft Word for Mac, there are three potential ways to recover your unsaved Word documents. These methods can also be applied to recover unsaved Excel files on your Mac.
The Word for Mac includes an AutoRecovery option. It is turned on by default. The app will automatically save a copy of an open Word file every 10 minutes. If Word freezes while you're working on a document, or if the computer crashes, you can use the AutoRecovery copy to recover unsaved Word document with the changes or additions that you made in your last Word for Mac session.
Unlike recovering unsaved Word document in Windows, the file recovery on Mac from the AutoRecovery folder is different.
Step 1. Open 'Finder' on your Mac, then head to 'Go' > 'Go to Folder'.
Step 2. Type: ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery and click 'Go'.
Step 3. Open the AutoRecovery folder, locate all the files that start with the words 'AutoRecovery save of'. Select the one you want to recover, rename the file, then add the '.doc' filename extension.
Step 4. Double-click the file. The document now opens in Word for Mac.
Step 5. Click the File menu and select 'Save As'. Type a new name for the file into the Name field, select a folder for the file and click the 'Save' button.
The Word for Mac saves a copy of the unsaved document named as Word Work File in the Temporary folder. Your Mac also temporarily keep files in this folder. Though for many Mac users, it's not easy to find it.
Step 1. Go to 'Applications' > 'Utilities' and double-click 'Terminal'.
Step 2. In Terminal, enter open $TMPDIR and you will be directed to the TMP folder which is used to keep files temporarily.
Step 3. In the TMP folder, find and open the folder named 'TemporaryItems'. In it, right-click the desired unsaved Word files and 'Open with..' Microsoft Word.
Step 4. Save the Word file by clicking on 'File' > 'Save As' and save it to another location.
The Word for Mac temporarily saves documents that the user has not yet saved themselves in a folder named 'Recovered items', located in the Trash. If there are no recovered files, this folder will not appear.
Step 1. Open 'Trash' by clicking its icon on the dock.
Step 2. Look for a folder labeled 'Recovered items' and click into it to look for your unsaved Word file. If you cannot find it, try the next solution.
The aforementioned three ways are exclusively for saving the file you're currently working on but suddenly disappear before clicking the Save button. To be specific, the methods will only work for files that are in the process of being worked on when they disappeared. Hence, if you lost a Word doc that is already existed by deletion, disk formatting or losing its access, you need to turn to other ways to recover a Word document on Mac.
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac is third-party specialized Mac data recovery software that can scour your hard drive, external hard drive, SD card, or USB flash drive to find all the lost data that vanishes without a trace on Mac OS X/macOS. It doesn't matter whether you emptied the trash bin or not, the deleted file will show up after you use the program to scan your selected drive.
For the first attempt, we strongly recommend you download its free version. It won't cost you a penny to search for your missing files. And since your problem is only for a few lost Word files, the 2GB recovery limit should be more than enough. The scan & recovery process is very simple, we’ll show you how it works.
Step 1. Select the location where your important Word documents were lost and click Scan button.
Step 2. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac will start immediately a quick scan as well as a deep scan on your selected disk volume. Meanwhile, the scanning results will be presented in the left pane.
Step 3. By Path and Type, you can quickly filter the Word files you've lost earlier. Select the target files and click Recover Now button to get them back at once.
After suffering from the fear of losing your Word documents, you must not want to experience this kind of situation again. Thus, it's necessary for you to know how to avoid losing your Word files. To avoid completely losing your files, you can:
An ever unsaved Word document exists in the computer's RAM, not on the hard disk. Thus, the chances to save a Word Document that has never been saved before are slim. Knowing this should give you a hint that you should save the word document at least once whenever you create a new one.
After you save your Word document, the AutoSave feature will begin to work. To minimize the loss of the progress on the file you are working, you can change the frequency of AutoSave:
Step 1. Open Microsoft Word on your Mac.
Step 2. Go to 'Word' > 'Preferences' and click 'Save' under Output and Sharing.
Step 3. Check all the items under Save Options (Recommended) and change the interval of AutoSave, for example, from every 10 minutes to every 5 minutes.
If you follow the two tips above, you will substantially decrease the risk of losing your Word documents. What if you carelessly deleted your important Word files on your Mac? No worry. Try the free method to retrieve permanently deleted Word documents with EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac.
-->Note
Office 365 ProPlus is being renamed to Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise. For more information about this change, read this blog post.
If you're looking for recent Word document recovery info, see:
For more on earlier versions of Word, see:
To fix this problem, use the following methods in the order in which they're presented, as appropriate for your situation.
To do this, follow these steps, as appropriate for the version of Windows that you're running.
Windows 10 and Windows 7
Word backup file names end with the .wbk extension. If the Always create backup copy option is selected, there may be a backup copy of the file.
Note
To locate this option:
To find the backup copy of the file, follow these steps:
If there's no .wbk file in the original folder, search the computer for any .wbk files. To do this, follow these steps:
Windows 10 and Windows 7
If you find any files that have the name 'Backup of' followed by the name of the missing file, use one of the following procedures, as appropriate for the version of Word that you're running.
Word for Office 365, Word 2019, Word 2016, and Word 2013
Word 2010
On the Mac if you're an Office 365 or 2019 subscriber you can set macOS to Dark Mode and Office will respect that choice. If you're still using Office 2016 you can choose between two Office themes: Colorful or Classic. To change the Office theme click on the menu for your Office application (Word, Excel, etc) and select Preferences General. Dec 11, 2018 Microsoft says Dark Mode support is available in Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook as of now. Of course, macOS Mojave is required as Dark Mode in the Microsoft suite. Feb 03, 2019 As Bob mentioned above, Dark Mode is a macOS system setting. Word for Mac will change into Dark Mode when we enable the Dark Mode in system settings. It is not feasible to disable it if we are using Office Mac less than 16.22. Microsoft office 2019 dark mode mac free.
AutoRecover file names end with the .asd extension. By default, Word searches for AutoRecover files every time that it starts, and then it displays all that it finds in the Document Recovery task pane.
Use Word to automatically find the AutoRecover files. To do this, follow these steps:
Right-click the taskbar, and then select Task Manager.
On the Processes tab, select any instance of Winword.exe or Microsoft Word, and then select End Task or End Process. Repeat this step until you have exited all instances of Winword.exe and Word.
Close the Windows Task Manager dialog box, and then start Word.
If Word finds the AutoRecover file, the Document Recovery task pane opens on the left side of the screen, and the missing document is listed as 'document name [Original]' or as 'document name [Recovered].' If this occurs, double-click the file in the Document Recovery pane, select Save As on the File menu, and then save the document as a .docx file. Manually change the extension to .docx, if necessary, by right-clicking the file and selecting Rename.
If the Recovery pane does not open, manually search for AutoRecover files. To do this, use one of the following procedures, as appropriate for the version of Word that you're running.
Word for Office 365, Word 2019, Word 2016, and Word 2013
Word 2010
If you can't locate an AutoRecover file in the location that is identified in the Folder name list, search your whole drive for any .asd files. My microsoft outlook keeps crashing. To do this, follow these steps:
Windows 10 and Windows 7
If you find any files that have the .asd extension, use one of the following procedures, as appropriate for the version of Word that you're running:
Word 2019, Word 2016, or Word 2013
Word 2010
Note
If you find an AutoRecover file in the Recovery pane that does not open correctly, go to 'Method 6: How to troubleshoot damaged documents' for more information about how to open damaged files.
Temporary file names end with the .tmp extension. To find these files, use one of the following procedure.
Windows 10 and Windows 7
Some temporary file names start with the tilde (~) character. To find these files, follow these steps:
Windows 10 and Windows 7
Select Start, type ~ in the Start Search box.
Select See more results.
Scroll through the files, and look for any that may match the last few dates and times that you edited the document. If you find the document that you're looking for, go to 'Method 6: How to troubleshoot damaged documents' for more information about how to recover information from the file.
For information about how Word creates and uses temporary files, see Description of how Word creates temporary files.
For information about how to troubleshoot damaged Word documents, see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
You can lose a Word document in certain situations. For example, the document may be lost if an error occurs that forces Word to close, if you experience a power interruption while editing, or if you close the document without saving your changes.
Note
The whole document may be lost if you have not recently saved the document. If you have saved your document, you may lose only the changes that you made since the last save. Be aware that some lost documents may not be recoverable.
The AutoRecover feature in Word performs an emergency backup of open documents when an error occurs. Some errors can interfere with the AutoRecover functionality. The AutoRecover feature is not a substitute for saving your files.
We do not provide any utilities to recover deleted documents. However, some third-party utilities to recover deleted documents might be available on the Internet.
For more information about AutoRecover, see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
The third-party products that are discussed in this article are manufactured by companies that are independent of Microsoft. Microsoft makes no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding the performance or reliability of these products.