You’ve been working on your project for an hour already, then suddenly, without warning, your computer freezes, that’s when you realize that you hadn’t clicked the “Save” button. of Microsoft Word, that all your work risks being lost and that you are completely overcome by panic.
The scenario is sometimes simpler and dumber than that. You finish your work in Word, you click on the close button, and when the small dialog box asks you if you want to save the changes, you click on the wrong button of course, namely ” No “.
Any self-respecting Microsoft Word user has lost a document at least once in their life. “Is it possible to recover my document?! » is the first thing that crosses the mind when this happens.
So here is a solution you can use to recover unsaved Word document :
The document version manager
Microsoft Office (from 2010), has a very handy feature that allows you to recover the latest version of an unsaved document. To do this, follow the steps below:
- Open Microsoft Word, if you haven’t already, and click on the menu ” File “, then click “Information”.
- At the very bottom of the information page you should have a section titled “Versions”. This section may contain links you can click to retrieve your document.
- On the other hand, if the mention “No previous version of this file exists” is displayed, so don’t panic and click the button “Manage versions” located to the left of this mention then on “Recover Unsaved Documents”.
- A dialog box opens asking you to choose a backup file. Click on the file of your choice to retrieve its contents.
In the event that no backup file is available, in the default location suggested by Microsoft Word, you can search your computer for all files with the ASD extension. To do this, click on the Windows start menu then on computer and in the search bar (at the top right) type *.asd .
Once one or more ASD files are located, you can open them with Microsoft Word by going through the “Manage versions” button and clicking on “Recover unsaved documents” as we explained before.
Configure AutoRecovery
Default Microsoft Word automatically saves the documents you are working on every 10 minutes to allow you to recover them in the event of an incident. Some people may find this time interval too broad and believe that it risks losing valuable information. Microsoft gives you the option to customize this setting:
Still going through the menu ” File “, click on “Options” then go to the section ” Registration “ of the dialog box that opens. You should see the line “Save autorecovery information every 10 minutes”. It’s up to you to enter the number of minutes that suits you best in the field provided for this purpose. Lowering it by half and setting it to 5 minutes should be quite reasonable.
One last little tip
The last piece of advice that we can give you, and which we have certainly told you several times, but which we will nevertheless remind once again, is that prevention is better than cure: save and save each document when it is created but also several times as your work progresses.