Unable to locate Office 2011 Autorecovery folder in Application support folder

Dear all,

I am in desperate need for your help. I closed an excel file I worked on for hours and am unable to locate it. I know it is in the Office 2011 Autorecovery Folder, since I can see it in shaded when I try to "save as" another excel file which was also recovered and is in this folder.

I've searched answers on this forum and see that you can supposedly find auto-recovered documents using this path

Click Finder > Go > Hold down the Option key and choose Library > Application Support > Microsoft > Office > Office 2011 AutoRecovery.

However, in my situation, I get stuck in the last step: I am not able to see Office 2011 AutoRecovery in the Office folder. Can somebody save me?

Thanks so much,

Lucile

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Oct 3, 2014 6:28 AM

Top-ranking reply

MLnash

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Jan 31, 2015 6:26 PM

I am a novice but I had a version of this problem and found the information at this link incredibly helpful in dealing with how office 2011 AutoRecovery is hidden in the current version of OSX. Hope this helps you.

http://macmanus.nl/2014/09/15/fixed-where-are-my-office-2011-autorecovery-files/

Nowadays, the AutoRecovery-folder is located in an entirely different location on your Mac. The correct path is this :

~/Users/username/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery

But there is yet another tiny hurdle to get to it : in the current version of OSX, the user’s Library-folder is a hidden folder. So if you want to access it, the easiest way to do so is :

– in the Finder, click on “Go” in the top menu bar

– when the pulldown menu appears, press the ALT-key on your keyboard (a.k.a. OPTION-key) and an extra option named “Library” will appear in the pulldown menu

– while holding the ALT-key, click on “Library” and your personal (hidden) Library-folder will open in the Finder

– there you can navigate to Application Support–>Microsoft–>Office to find the “Office 2011 AutoRecovery”-folder you are looking for

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32 replies

zero119

Level 1

14 points

Jun 27, 2017 11:23 PM in response to lulugingembre

Just in case anyone finds their way here by Google, as I did looking for how to find the Office 2016 autosave files...

You can locate them by going clicking the Go menu in the Finder, choosing Go To Folder and pasting:

~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/

in the box.

You may need to rename any files you find there as .doc instead of .docx if they won't open properly.

Maybe you can try uFlysoft Data Recovery for Mac, it can recover LOST DATA on Mac only in three steps:

Step 1. Launch the software to scan the device where your files deleted

Step 2: Preview the scan result files and make mark if it is the one you find

Step 3: Recover files

Hope this helps someone

Gio14man

Level 1

4 points

Oct 29, 2017 10:20 PM in response to lulugingembre

I need help!!!! I need help with a word document to restore my document. I need worst case scenario to get this since i have been trying for the past 2 hours!! Can anyone please help me!!!??? Auto-recovery is not my latest paper 😟

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Unable to locate Office 2011 Autorecovery folder in Application support folder