Excel – Why is Excel and Office always asking me to recover documents

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Since Office 2002 (probably even 97) until Office 2010 (probably even 2013), opening Excel and Word constantly results in me being shown a list of documents that I might want to recover. As far as I know, I save my documents, close them, and then shut down Excel and Word like any other application by clicking the X. I don't ALT+F4, open task manager and terminate the processes, unplug my computer, go out to my garage an flip all the breakers, etc. Every time this document list shows up, I feel a little paranoid, as if I need to look at them or something just to make sure I am not losing anything that I somehow didn't save.

I'd like someone to tell me that this is just Office messing with my mind, that everything I need has been safely saved to my drive. Don't just tell me that because I want you to, though. If you know what's up with this, do share.

Best Answer

If you have closed the files normally and you are still getting auto recovery files then this means you still have temporary files in autosave folder.

Go in File/Options/Save: find the path and delete everything in that folder. Close excel/word and open again. Check if you get autorecovery files again or not.
Go in File/Options/Save: Change the location of the autosave files, preferably give it a sub folder for excel and do the same thing in word if you are having problems there.
Do run scan disk to see if there are disk problems. If you do I suggest you just buy another drive, its not worth losing your data anyway.

Related Solutions

Word – Set Microsoft Word template to always save documents based on it to a certain location

One solution is to use a macro-enabled template (dotm) with a VBA macro to replace SaveAs.

An example macro is:

Public Sub FileSaveAs()
    Dim dlg As Dialog
    Dim strSaveFolder
    strSaveFolder = Application.Options.DefaultFilePath(wdDocumentsPath)
    Select Case ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate.Name
        Case "Woodworking.dot"
            Application.Options.DefaultFilePath(wdDocumentsPath) = "C:\Woodworking"
        Case "Travel.dot"
            Application.Options.DefaultFilePath(wdDocumentsPath) = "C:\Travel"
    End Select
    Set dlg = Dialogs(wdDialogFileSaveAs)
    dlg.Show
    Application.Options.DefaultFilePath(wdDocumentsPath) = strSaveFolder
End Sub

You will still need to attach this macro to Ctrl-S.

If you use a separate template document per user, the above "Select Case" can be simplified to a simple assign in each of the templates.

source

Microsoft Office 2010 Starter – How to Reactivate After Trial Expiration

Do you have a pre-publisher trial backup ?,
Is your machine an OEM with a recovery partiton or recovery disks ?, these will return you to factory settings and all the software that came with it.
You can then reactivate 'office starter', update all software reinstall programs and copy your documents, etc back onto your computer.
Sorry I could not think of or find an easier way.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Word – Set Microsoft Word template to always save documents based on it to a certain location

Microsoft Office 2010 Starter – How to Reactivate After Trial Expiration

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