How to Retrieve Unsaved PowerPoint Presentations

If you are making a PowerPoint presentation for your lecture tomorrow, you should save your presentation once a while in case that your PowerPoint files would get lost. In certain occasions, we will unfortunately lose the unsaved PowerPoint files, and we desperately want to retrieve the lost PowerPoint files.

How to do it then? People may feel confused on this issue. I’m using a Windows 7 computer and the Microsoft PowerPoint in Version 2010, so I will show you how to retrieve unsaved PowerPoint 2010 files on Windows 7 computer at first.

Before starting to recover the unsaved PowerPoint files, you need to make sure that the PowerPoint AutoRecover is enabled within PowerPoint. You can have a check by clicking "Tools > Options", and then check "Save AutoRecover Info every" and enter a number you want. If you have done this before, you are able to find the auto-saved PowerPoint records after the unexpectedly data loss. The following guidance will show you how to do that:

1.       Click the Start button on your computer, and enter ppt*.tmp in the searching column, and hit the searching button.

2.       If a file matches, you can right-click the file and choose "Rename". Rename the file with any name you want, but you should add the file extension as .ppt.

3.       Double-click to open the file, and check whether this is the file you need to recover. If it is, you can use the "Save as" option to save it on your computer. Note that if you are getting an error message when you attempt to open the file, you will not be able to recover the PowerPoint file.

If you can’t use this method to get the files back, the following method may also be helpful:

1.       Go to "Save" option in your PowerPoint, and find the location of the AutoRecover file. On a Windows 7 computer, it should be in C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\PowerPoint.

2.       Click "Tools > Folder Options > View", and check "Show hidden files and folders". Then you will get the PowerPoint files with a random-code name.

3.       Double-click to open the PowerPoint file to see whether it is the one you want to recover. If yes, you can save it with the name you need.

You are also able to take advantage of the "Recover Unsaved Presentations" option to recover the deleted PowerPoint files. You only need to open the PowerPoint file, go to "File > Recent", and click "Recover Unsaved Presentations" at the right bottom. This recovery option is built in PowerPoint 2010 or later.

If you want to retrieve an unsaved PowerPoint 2007 presentation, you will find it is easy to be done. If you don’t save the PowerPoint file and restart MS PowerPoint application, then the app will automatically recover the unsaved file. If not, you can search for the unsaved presentations on your computer. The following steps will show you how to do it:

1.       Start PowerPoint 2007 on your computer.

2.       Click the Microsoft Office button and click "Open".

3.       Choose "File Name" and enter the name of the PowerPoint file in the box. If you don’t remember the name of the file, just enter %temp%\ppt*.tmp in the box.

4.       Click the Open button and then click the name of the file you want to recover, then click "Open".

5.       If you find the file you want to recover, just click "Save" to save the files on your computer.

Note that the presentations may not be saved in random-coded names, so you will have to open the files one by one until you find the presentation you need.

These methods may be helpful for the people who want to retrieve unsaved PowerPoint presentations, and when you come up with a power failure or program crash which leads to the loss of the presentations, you can check these methods out.