There are several ‘TemporaryItems’ folders:Ĭheck all of them and open in Office any files saved there. Scroll down and look for TemporaryItems folders.

It’s a hidden folder, the fastest way to reach it is via TerminalĪpplications | Utilities | Terminal then type the command TMP or T folderĪnother hiding place is Mac’s folder for temporary or TMP files. They are standard Office documents that can be opened directly in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. The documents are prefixed with ‘AutoRecovery save of …’ Library/Containers//Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecover

Then drill down to the following folders for Word, Excel or PowerPoint: Open Finder the Go | Go to Folder … then type: The AutoRecover folders are where Office keeps autosaved documents. If those options don’t help, it’s time to dig into the Mac and see what’s hiding in obscure and hidden folders. OneDrive, Dropbox and other cloud storage have their own Recycle Bin or versioning features to save deleted documents or earlier versions of a document. If the document was saved to a cloud service, it’s worth checking the online storage. Unsaved Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents may be hiding in there. That opens a Finder window showing all the deleted files.Īlso look for a Trash/Bin folder called ‘Recovered Items’. Bin or TrashĪt risk of stating the obvious … have you check the Trash or Bin? Right-click on the Bin icon and choose Open. So it’s worth checking Time Machine backups to see if the document or file has been saved to the local snapshot. (Windows File History feature has a similar local cache when the external drive isn’t available).

These backups are called local snapshots. When the backup drive isn’t available, Time Machine saves a hourly snapshot to your local drive and keeps that snapshot for 24 hours. Time Machine works all the time, it will backup every hour even if the backup drive isn’t connected. Maybe you think Time Machine won’t help because the backup drive isn’t connected? Not so fast. MacOS Time Machine is the obvious place to look. This article is also helpful if you’re trying to find and delete any files or documents that must be removed for privacy reasons. If you’ve lost or accidently deleted a Word for Mac document (or Excel or PowerPoint) there are various places to look for it some might not occur to you.

How to open last autosave word on mac