Is there a way to manually open the Recovered Documents Pane in Word 2013

Every reference that I've looked at suggests forcing a crash, and then re-opening word. This seem like an kludgey way of resolving the issue, and was hoping there was a manual way to force open the Recovery Pane, or some kind of plugin I can download to simulate the process.

Since no one seems to actually understand your question, I will take a stab at it.

If I understand your problem correctly, you open Excel and the Document Recovery task pane appears with a list of files for you to view. You click on a file, review it for errors, save and/or close the file depending on whether you found errors, etc, and then go back to the task pane to open the next file.

But wait...it's gone! Slightly confused about why that panel would disappear after clicking on only one file in the list, you search around on the File menu and all the other tabs, frustrated that you can't find the stupid panel again. So you close Excel and restart it, hoping the panel appears again. And it does! You quickly realize, though, that since you have something like 20 files to review, closing and re-opening Excel after each file is beyond annoying.

I had this problem, too. It's unbelievably annoying. Who the hell thought that was a good idea??

tl;dr

Anyway, I found the answer by accident. Next time you have this panel open and you click on a file, when you are finished but before you close the document, look at the bottom left corner of the window. You should see the word "Ready" and then "Recovered". Click on the word "Recovered" to reopen the task pane. Next, write an angry note to Microsoft via the Feedback button. Because this is just asinine.

Go to File > Open (or press Ctrl+O). There should be an option on the bottom right saying Recover Unsaved Documents.

This will open the folder with the unsaved documents, not the Recovery Pane, but it should solve your issue.

Often had the same issue and the associated frustration, so I ran Process Monitor (tool from Microsoft SysInternals site) whilst having the Document Recovery Pane open to try and capture where Excel was getting this list of 'files to be recovered' from: I found them here:

"C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel"

Likewise you should also find files-to-be-recovered from other Office applications if you replace "Excel" with any other Office application name (e.g. "Word"). You should be able to simply open the files you find in those locations with the associated Office Application. You will likely find that MS Office usually stores these backup in the equivalent Binary Office File Format, but this should make no difference, since once you have opened the file you can save is as any valid format for the relevant Office Application (e.g. Excel, Word, Power Point etc.).