Page Last Updated: 19/02/2010
Recovery of Microsoft Excel Content from Temp Files

Microsoft Office has extensive AutoSave and Auto Recovery options that allow you to rescue your work in the event that it is lost due to a power failure, system crash or plain human error. However many people don't know how to use these features or that they even exist.

Even if you don't have these features enabled, you can sometimes recover data from the various temporary files that are created by Office while you are working on the document.

Microsoft have changed the way AutoSave and Auto Recover works in different versions of Office. Therefore you may want to experiment before you rely on this information.

Finding the Temporary Files

When a new file is started a temporary file is created. This can be either in the windows temp directory, in "C:\ Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft". If the file is stored on a network drive then it will be temporarily created there.

This temporary file will have a few different letters after the tilde (or squiggly line “ ~”) . These are good ones to look for to find some lost info. There are others, but these are the ones most likely to contain data that can be recovered.

Finding and using the temporary and auto save files

Excel

Excel doesn't have the AutoSave feature enabled as default, you have to add it. This is because it isn't always practical to have this functionality enabled. If you have it enabled and want to experiment with a spreadsheet, you should create a copy then open that so that the AutoSave doesn't overwrite the original.

To enable the AutoSave feature, you have to use an Add In. Go to "Tools" "Add ins" and choose "AutoSave".
With Office XP, AutoSave has been moved out from Add Ins to Options, in a similar way to Word. You will find the settings under "Save" where you can also disable the Auto Recover feature for that particular work book.

Excel automatically saves every 10 minutes to the default location of "C:\ Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp" or "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp" on Windows 7/Vista. The files are identifiable as they are saved as a number .tmp e.g. "28.tmp". This means that they look different from word or any other temporary files that are being saved there by other applications.

The temp file for excel can also look like ~dfxxxx.tmp .

Other Useful Information

If you have been working on a file for hours and the document was created via copying and pasting or at one point had cut the entire page or document to paste some place and then placed something else on the clip board, the data may not have been lost. This is because when any info is copied it is sent to a temp file with the name ~wrlxxxx.tmp. Therefore you could search your system for files of this name and then use the same "Drag and Drop" technique to view the data in Notepad to recover the data.

Another interesting thing to note is that when a change is made to a document that requires a temp file to be created, when you press the save button all the temp files are merged together into one file and the file is renamed to what you called it. The original document that you created is then deleted.

Further Information

How To Recover MS Excel File If Unwanted Changes Are Made
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/150368

How to troubleshoot errors when you save Excel files
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/271513

Description of the way that Excel saves files
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814068

Automatically save and recover Office 2007 files
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP101407291033.aspx

About this site

This information originally started life as a page on amset.info, our community assistance site. However that site is targeted at Microsoft Exchange server, as Sembee Ltd. is a Microsoft Exchange consultancy. Therefore it was moved to its own domain in early 2010. Traffic from amset.info is directed here.

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