From the course: Office 365 for Administrators: Troubleshooting Issues for Users (Office 365/Microsoft 365)

Troubleshoot: Lost Excel workbooks - Office 365 Tutorial

From the course: Office 365 for Administrators: Troubleshooting Issues for Users (Office 365/Microsoft 365)

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Troubleshoot: Lost Excel workbooks

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- [Instructor] We've all had days where things go wrong. And if you lose your Excel file, that can add to that day that is not going your way. But there are steps that you can do to locate missing files. And these steps are going to be very similar to the steps that we've already explored in some of the other Office applications. As always, I like to start in File Explorer. Choose the folder where you think your document may be. And you can scroll through that folder or, to make life a little bit easier, you can perform a search. I'm going to search for all of the Excel files. Starting off with an astericks, which is wildcard. And then we'll follow this through with the extension of Excel, which is XLS. If you stop here, this will include all versions of Excel. If you're looking for just newer versions, follow this through with an X. If you're unable to find the file here, the next option is to check the AutoRecover folder. But before you can do that, you need to know where that AutoRecover folder is located. The easiest way to do that is in Excel itself. Open Excel, File, Options, and then Save. Your AutoRecover file location will be listed. I'm going to copy that. Before I close this window, I'm going to change how often my files are saved for AutoRecover. Right now it's set at 10 minutes, which is default. I'm going to reduce that down to one minute. Next, I'm going to select the Windows key and type run, and paste the file path. If there are any AutoRecovered files, they'll be in this folder. I don't have any. And to avoid losing files and freaking yourself out, you can have Excel automatically back up a file when you're working on it. To do so, pop back into Excel. And then open the file that you would like to have a backup of. Select File, Save As, select your location, and you can do that by this PC or Browse, and then More options. Under Tools, select General Options, and then Always create a backup. Now this file will always be backed up. I already have a version of this file. I'm going to go ahead and replace it. We pop back into File Explorer. We can see that backed up file. And there is our backed up file. Perfect. Personally, I like to create a backup of important Excel files just in case I'm having one of those days.

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