Question :

I have some Word-documents that I am working on and now I can’t find one of them any longer… I’ve searched on my Mac, but I can’t find the file I’m looking for… I was almost certain I had saved it, but I must have overwritten it or saved it under a different name or something since I can’t find it any longer… I’ve been on this for about an hour and I’m completely stressed out since I’m afraid the file is gone forever and I need to completely redo it…

Do you have any suggestion that might help ?


Answer :
This is not a definite solution for anyone who has as lost Word-document, but it’s an ultimate ‘stress saver’ (a.k.a. ‘life saver’) for anyone who is used to saving Word-documents on his/her Mac :

If you do a quick save of a document in MS Office nowadays — be it a Word .docx, a PowerPoint .pptx or an Excel .xlsx — Office defaults you to saving it on your OneDrive, even if you never use your OneDrive…

So, here’s how to check if your ‘lost’ Word-document was ‘accidentally’ saved to your OneDrive ( note : this solution is nearly identical for PowerPoint & Excel ) :

• do not close MS Word if you have lost a Word-document ; the chances of still being able to recover the Word-document are extremely decreased if you close of re-open MS Word since that partially wipes the temporal memory…
• with MS Word still open, go to “File” in the top menu bar
• in the pulldown menu that appears, click on “Open Recent”
• in the nested pulldown menu that appears, click on “More”
• in the “Microsoft Word” titled window that appears, scroll down the list of recently opened and/or edited documents to find your ‘lost’ file
• if you have any idea of the last date you have worked on the ‘lost’ file, quickly scroll down to that date
• when you find the ‘lost’ file in this list, see that ‘OneDrive’ is listed as the saved location, then click on the file name and the document will open
  (if you can’t find it in this list, not all is lost, but you will have to search the ‘recovered files’ first ; this post will hopefully help you on that)
• when the document is open on your screen, scroll through it to check if actually is the ‘lost’ file and the correct/recent version of it
• if so, go to “File” in the top menu bar
• in the pulldown menu that appears, click on “Save as” or “Save a Copy”
• in the window that opens, make sure you select a location on your Mac to save the document to, then click “Save”
• that’s it… you now have your ‘lost’ document back and saved to your Mac

enjoy 😉