How to recover a lost Microsoft Word document

The heart-sinking feeling when you exit a document and realise you didn’t press ‘save’. The document is now gone, into the ibis and you have frantically googled ‘how to recover a lost Word document’.

Or you know that forgetting to press save is something you’ve done in the past, so this time you didn’t forget. You quickly pressed ‘save’ after made some changes to ensure you don’t lose your precious work, before realising you just saved over the last version of the document because you didn’t ‘save as’ as new file. WHY?!?

How do you recover your lost document?

How do you recover the document you just saved over before someone else in the team realises what you just did?

Well, you’ve come to the right place, in this article we will show you how to recover a lost Microsoft Word Document, saving you from a world of stress.

Recovering a lost Microsoft Word Document

1. Open a new Word Document
2. Click the File Tab
3. Click Manage Document
4. Select Recover Unsaved Documents

5. Look for your missing file in the box
6. Find and Click your missing file

You have now successfully found and opened your lost Microsoft Word File.

Now that you have the file back, press ‘save’ and continue working. Turning on AutoSave is a fantastic way to ensure you never lose a document again.

How to prevent losing a Microsoft Word Document

Microsoft Word now has an AutoSave function that will save your document every few minutes for you, to ensure you never lose another edit again.

Here’s how to turn AutoSave on in Word:

1. Open Word
2. Find and click the tab next to AutoSave

3. Upload/store the document in your preferred ‘Place’

4. Press Upload

AutoSave has now successfully been turned on and you can continue working without having to worry about pressing ‘save’ every 30 minutes.

Looking for an easier way to keep track of your Microsoft Word Documents?

Keeping track of your document can be challenging, especially when you are saving multiple versions of a file and collaborating with your team.

When you are working in a shared drive, without remote access your team may even pull a document out of the shared drive, save it to their desktop and work on this while they are offline.
Once back in the office, it seems simple enough to then drop the update file back into the shared drive and continue collaborating as normal.

But what if someone else had made changes to the live shared file in the time this colleague had taken a version offline, made changes and then re-saved it to the shared drive. This would leave you with two different ‘updated’ versions of the same document and no way of knowing which one is the most recent file or when the changes were made.

Your team may need to access the files offline for a number of reasons, maybe they are travelling, working from home, from an airport or an aeroplane where there is no internet connection. There are a number of reasons a team member may need to work offline leaving us open to disjointed file management more frequently than we’d like to admit.

Lucky for us, there are now some great purpose-built tools on the market such as Simul Docs that not only manage version control for you but allow you to work offline, or from anywhere without losing track of any edits, changes or updates.

Simul knows that when you are making changes to an existing document you will want it saved as a new file, and probably don’t want to have to remember to press ‘save as’ before you start editing and then ‘save’ every 30 minutes.

So Simul will automatically create a new version every time an edit is made to an existing document, saves as you go, word by word and gives you access to your documents anywhere, anytime.

You can access your documents offline on Simul, make changes and re-format knowing that the moment your computer or device is back online Simul will update the file for the rest of your team to see and save it in line with the version history.

If two team members happen to be working on the same document, offline, at the same time Simul has your back here too.

Each team members file will be saved as a new version, uploaded when they are back online, and an alert is sent to the document owner that there are two new versions available to their review.

The document owner can then review the documents and merge them together at the click of a button.

Simul allows you to collaborate from anywhere, anytime without worrying about saving your work or accidentally over-riding a colleagues file.

Its collaboration made easy and Simul knows you needed it.

So, give it a try, with Simul on your side you’ll never search for a lost document again.