Utilize the Excel AutoSave and AutoRecover Featureġ.In this section, we will talk about the following points one by one. Autorecovery is not needed there, because both are synced almost realtime with the cloud.How To Recover Unsaved/Overwritten Excel File? The Mac suite of Office 365 also consists of OneNote and OneDrive. Please note 2: autorecovery only works AFTER you save a new file (the file has to have a name) Please note 1: when you save your file and quit Excel, the corresponding “Autorecovered” file(s) will disappear I clicked OK and there was my file again! I got the message that I could reopen Excel and recover my file. Then Force Quit Excel and see that the “Autorecovered” file was still there. The last test was to open Finder with the “Autorecovered” file visible. Then navigate in Finder to the path of the recovery file(s)! Hold the ‘Option/alt’ key, then right click on the Finder icon in the dock and click Relaunch In Terminal, paste the following: defaults write AppleShowAllFiles YES. To be able to see and recover this recovery file: I duplicated, renamed and moved the latter to another directory and opened the file. Users//Library/Containers//Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Ĭontaining 2 files: (very small) and test2xxx((Autorecovered-)).xlsb. The file ~$test2xxx.xls (very small) in the same directory as my original folder and There they were: 3 other files besides my original file! Then I opened Terminal and typed sudo find / -type f -iname “*test2xxx*” Then I set autorecovery to 2 minutes in Excel, created the Excel file Test2xxx.xlsx in the Documents directory and waited 3 minutes. So, what I did is the following: I added Terminal to the apps that have full Disk Access (System Preferences/Security&Privacy). I work in the the latest version of Excel 365 (16.21.1), so that cannot be the problem. The tip to enter open $TMPDIR in Terminal (look in ) did not work either. But after reading hundreds of comments on dozens of forums I saw that I was not alone in not finding the path at all.

Perhaps that is the case for some versions of Excel for Mac. Perhaps for some people the files are actually there. Even Microsoft believes the /Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery path exists and contains your valuable recovery files. Many sites make you believe that Excel works the same way.

You can navigate with Finder to that path and find your recovery files there. Users//Library/Containers//Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery Users//Library/Containers//Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery and The location of the recovery files of Word and Powerpoint is well known: Or are you working on files and leave them open for several days and want to make copies each hour or so, just in case, of the recovery files, e.g. Did you encounter a crash of Word, Powerpoint or Excel? And you want to know where to find the autorecovery files?

Excel autorecover file location mac