Recovering Unsaved Documents in Word/Excel/Powerpoint

If you have closed a Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint document without saving, or if it has crashed while you were working on it, you can follow these short steps below to see if it's recoverable through conventional means:

1. Open up the piece of software you were using (in this example I'm using Microsoft Word), and go to the Open option on the left.

2. With the Open option selected, click on Recover Unsaved Documents at the bottom of the window.

3. In the File Explorer window that opens up, if you can see the document that you are looking for, you can highlight it and select Open.

4. Once the document has been recovered and is open, make sure to follow the prompt to save it, and remember to save it to your H:\ drive, as this is backed up daily.

If you don't see the document in "Recover Unsaved Documents", and you have only been working on it during the same day that it has gone missing, it will likely not be recoverable.

This is because our backups run daily. If the document is missing entirely, we will need to recover it from the last backup taken which is typically the night before.