Question: I accidentally messed up the Office documents (Word/PowerPoint/Excel) I was working on, and I didn’t save it before, so I wanted to get the auto-saved version from the AutoRecovery-folder as I’ve done in the old days of Office 2008 and 2004. But now I am using Office 365, and I can’t find the AutoRecovery folder anywhere where is it? Answer: You might have guessed: nowadays, the AutoRecovery-folder is located in an entirely different location on your Mac. If you are running Office 2011 for Mac (whether as part of Office 365 or not) the correct path to the AutoRecovery-folder is this: ~/Users/ username/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery And if you are running Office 2016 for Mac (whether or not as part of Office 365) the correct path to the Word 15‘s AutoRecovery-folder(s) is: ~/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.

Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/ for PowerPoint 15 the correct path is: ~/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.microsoft. PowerPoint/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/ and for Excel 15 the correct path is: ~/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.

Excel/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/ BEWARE: it’s not straight-forward to get to this folder in recent/current versions of OSX and macOS, as the user’s Library-folder is a hidden folder. So if you want to access it, the easiest way to do so is: – in the Finder, click on “Go” in the top menu bar – when the pulldown menu appears, press the ALT-key on your keyboard (a.k.a. OPTION-key) and an extra option named “Library” will appear in the pulldown menu – while holding the ALT-key, click on “Library” and your personal (hidden) Library-folder will open in the Finder – there you can navigate further using the paths listed above to find the AutoRecovery-folder you’re looking for That’s it. 😉 NOTE # 1: It is advisory to also switch on the “file overwrite protection” (or “double backup”) option as it stores the previous version of the file you are working on.

Since I upgraded to Word 2016 for mac from the online download store, I've had spotty saving capability, and now it has stopped saving 90% of the time. I even tried to copy and paste it into a new document and it still won't save. Save and save as are both not working, even after I have updated. As a last resort, you can try to access the document in Microsoft Word X or Word 2004 on a Mac, as some older documents are inaccessible with the Word 2008 compatibility mode. If the document can be opened with an older version of the program, save the file with a new name, and then again try to use it on the Mac with Word 2008.

In Word, you turn this feature on from Word –> Preferences –> Save and then mark the “Always create a backup copy” check box. This way, whenever you click “Save”, a backup version is made of the previous/stored version before it overwrites the stored version of the file so with it turned on, you at least have one prior version of your file. NOTE #2: If you do not see the autosave file you were expecting to find in the AutoRecovery-folder, you might need a ‘show hidden files’-app to find it. Especially Excel-autosave-files tend to be hidden.

There are various ‘show hidden files’-apps: The FREE one in the Mac App Store is but you could also use another FREE app like (by ZandorSmith.nl) or (by Nektony.com) or (by CreativeCag.com) Just beware! That you can mess up OSX or macOS entirely is you accidentally delete or alter files that are hidden in regular use!

[ a big Thank You to thekurrgan for discovering this and posting this find here ] NOTE #3: it turns out that there’s a bug in Excel 2011 for Mac: even though the Autosave does save a file with an.xlsx file extension, it’s not a true.xlsx file! Trying to open it will lead to an “Microsoft cannot open this file”-error. The solution is to change the file extension to either.xlsb (Excel binary format) or.xlb (older Excel backup format), to enable Excel to recognize the file and enable it to open. [ a big Thank You to Paul Preston for noticing this problem and for Bryan P for posting the solution on and to Rich Michaels for posting his updated solution on ].

@Laura Clemons: Thanks for the feedback.xls-files are Excel files formatted in the old Excel file format that can be read by any version go Excel.xlsx-files are Excel files formatted in the newer XML-based 2007 Excel file format and can only be read by Excel versions from Office 2007 and newer since the release of the.xlsx-format in 2007 was over a decade ago, using it shouldn’t be a problem for any currently used PC or Mac running Excel so, if you didn’t do so already: start saving your Excel files in.xlsx-format enjoy 😉. This happened to me and none of these options proved effective. I was working on a document I had shared through 365 with a colleague. The document suddenly crashed with an error message that says “Hmmm, that address doesn’t look right.” Closing that, Word disappeared. When I reloaded, the document was gone. Not in Onedrive or in any other backup folder.

• Click Done. Grammarly for microsoft word mac.