Recover unsaved workbooks

We've all done it before—either you forget to save a workbook, you accidentally save it when you should have saved it as a different name, or maybe you lose work because of that rare power outage. 

Whatever the cause, there's no need to panic when you think you've lost your work in Excel 2010. You can quickly and easily recover older (unsaved) versions of your workbook.

Excel 2010 saves your unsaved versions of files in a specific folder on your hard drive. 

Remember that these are new, unsaved files or temporary files, such as those you might open from an email or file transfer. Here's how you can recover one of these unsaved files.

To recover an unsaved version of a file:

1. Open Excel 2010 and click on the File tab.
2. Click Recent on the left, and then click the Recover Unsaved Workbooks button.
3. In the Open dialog box, you'll see the contents of your UnsavedFiles folder. For Windows Vista/7, this location is: C:\Users\User_Name\AppData\Local \Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles. For Windows XP, the location is: C:\Documents and Settings\User_Name \LocalSettings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles.

Note that the files saved in your UnsavedFiles folder will no longer be available after four days from the file's creation or modification.