How to Recover Microsoft Word document

Solution 1:

This MAY work: On the File tab/menu, select Recent. In the lower right half is the button "Recover Unsaved Documents". Click and see if you can still recover it. This may work even after you have rebooted your computer.

You can also check the Info option on the File tab/menu - try the Manage Versions button.

FYI, every application potentially will hold the data on behalf of the clipboard. Word gives you the option of physically placing it on the clipboard when you exit Word - and that's where you should have said Yes instead of No.

Good luck, Yosh

Solution 2:

To complement @yosh's answer, I had some additional issues while recovering the file, so I am posting since it might be useful to future users, in case they don't find the files using the recommended approach:

1. When my Word 2016 crashed, it didn't offer any unsaved files after restart. Clicking on the Recover Unsaved Documents button opened the local application data folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles), which was empty. But this is apparently the first folder you should try looking in, just paste the link inside Windows Explorer to check if it contains anything.

2. I then made a search of the entire Users folder, and found the unsaved .asd. files inside the roaming app data folder, i.e. %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles. I am not sure why they were here, honestly. I also thought I could just rename it to .docx, but it didn't work (these are both zip files under the hood, but internal .asd structure seems to be different).

3. After copying the .asd files from roaming to the local folder, I restarted Word and then it properly showed the recovery tool window at the left side of the screen.

4. Immediately went to Word options and configured Auto recovery save interval to 2 minutes. :)