How to Recover Excel Temporary Files in Windows 10

Summary

If you have lost an unsaved Excel, you can restore it from Excel temporary files. This page will show you where are temporary excel files stored in Windows 10 and guide you to recover the temp files for Excel 2016, 2013, and 2010. What's more, a professional file recovery software is recommended to help you recover deleted or lost Excel document at a high recovery rate.

Why can't I restore workbooks from Excel temp folder immediately?

"Hi, I want to know how I can recover temporary Excel files in Windows 10? It's a disaster for not saving workbook you had put a lot of painful work into. I've searched all over the computer, literally found nothing but a folder containing many files named as ~xxx.tmp. I felt so excited and thought that might be the temporary copy of the lost file. To my disappointment, it's nothing but useless garbage with several bytes. What should I do? If I can't recover XLS file from the temp folder, is there another way to do it?"

Microsoft Office offers the AutoRecover tool in 2016/2013/2010 to save your working Excel document automatically. When you lose the unsaved Excel files suddenly due to a power failure, system crash or misoperation, you can recover data from the temporary files created by Office. The AutoSave and AutoRecover may have different names in different Office versions, but they all have the same function.

Where Are Temporary Excel Files Stored in Windows 10

Microsoft Office's AutoRecover feature will save the Excel file, Word document, etc. files into a temporary folder in Windows PC every a few minutes. The only thing that you need to do is to turn on the AutoRecover feature in Office Excel or Word, PPT apps.

Excel will automatically save the working files every XX minutes (you can set the interval time as you like) to the default location.

Windows 10: C:\Users\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

Windows 8/ 7/Vista: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

How to Recover Temporary Files in Excel 2016/2013/2010

In Office 2010 and the higher version, recovering Excel temp files is quite easy by using the Recover unsaved workbooks feature. Except for this way, you still have other solutions to recover unsaved Excel file on Windows 10, link to see details.

As said before, you can go to the following path to find the Excel temporary file:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

Or you can make it with the guides below.

1. Open Excel, and click "File" > "Open" > "Recent" > "Recover Unsaved Workbooks" in the bottom left corner.

2. Select the unsaved file and click the "Open" button. Then, on the pop-up window, choose "Save As" to recover it.

If you also meet the Word document missing problem when working with Microsoft Office and find no way out, you can read how to recover unsaved document in Windows 10.

Bonus Tip. How to Recover Lost/Deleted Excel Files with Data Recovery Software 

The above solutions only work for getting back the unsaved Excel document through the temp files. What if you have lost some saved Excel files due to accidental deletion, storage device formatting, system corruption, or virus attack? If you happen to encounter such a problem, don't fret, you have EaseUS hard drive recovery software to help you.  This versatile data recovery software is famous for recovering deleted files at very high recovery rate in the easiest way. The supported document file formats are: DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX, PDF, CWK, HTML/HTM, INDD, EPS, etc.

Now, download and try this reputable data recovery wizard to recover your lost Excel document within three simple steps. It won't let you down.

Simple steps for Excel file recovery are as follows:

Step 1. Specify a location

Run EaseUS Data Recovery Software, firstly, you're asked to choose a location to start. Choose the drive X: or perhaps a specific folder on Desktop or somewhere else, and then click "Scan".

Step 2. Scan data

During the scan, you'll see more and more data showing up very quickly in the "Deleted files" result. That's part of what the software has found and displayed.

Step 3. Preview and recover

To quickly find the Excel files in the massive data in the scan results, click on the "Filter" on the top area and choose "Documents". Or, search .xls or .xlsx in the Search box. Select the desired files and click "Recover".