Recover unsaved files to Office and customize recent files

Have you always wondered if you can customize recent Office files and recover unsaved Word, Excel and Powerpoint files?

Of course yes. In the versions of Office, starting from 2010 up to the most recent ones, particularly interesting features have been added that allow users to recover even files that have not been saved.

After opening Word, Excel or Powerpoint , a list of the files you have most recently worked on is shown. These lists can be customized in various ways. You can pin certain files to always appear at the top of the list, you can delete files from the list to hide, and even those files that are no longer located in the saved location in the Office apps. You can also change the number of recent files that are shown.

In this article I will show you these functions on Word but the procedure can also be applied without substantial changes to Excel, Powerpoint and other Office package applications. You can also disable the display of recent files by setting zero as the number of recent files to show when the program starts.

Always display one or more files at the top of the recent files list

After opening Word (or Excel or Powerpoint ), the Home tab of the program shows the files you have worked on most recently. Hovering the mouse cursor over a file, the button to pin (lock) it will appear to the left of the "Last Changed" column. Clicking on it will place it at the top of the list and put it on the Blocked tab.

The Pin button will change and clicking on it again will remove the item from the Blocked tab.

Delete a file from the recent files list

To delete a single file from the recent files list, click Open to view all recent files.

Right-click on the document to be deleted, then choose Remove from List from the menu.

Change the number of recent files displayed

You can also change the number of recent files that are shown in the list.

Go to New -> Empty Document and then click on File -> Options and choose Advanced Settings in the window.

Scroll down the page until you find View . In Show this number of recent documents the default value is 50 . We can change it and then go to OK to save the change.

If we choose the value 0 (zero) it will be like deactivating this option and the list of recent files will be shown empty .

Clear the removed items

After working on a file, it doesn't necessarily remain in its original location. It may be moved to another folder , renamed or even deleted . Clicking on the recent files relating to documents that are no longer available will therefore not open anything and can be deleted from the list if desired.

In the context menu choose Clear removed items . The files in the list removed from their path or renamed will be deleted from the same list and only those that can be opened with a click will remain.

You will then have to confirm that you want to remove it by clicking Yes in the next popup window.

How to Recover Unsaved Office Documents

It may happen that in a hurry a user forgets to save a file before closing Word, Excel or Powerpoint and going to Don't save in the dialogue box that appears after clicking on the cross.

Starting with Office 2013 it is possible to recover these files because they will be automatically saved in a program folder called UnsavedFiles and then it will be possible to recover them by opening them again.

Go to File -> Open and click on the Recover Unsaved Documents button at the bottom of the window.

File Explorer will open at C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles .

If there are documents in this folder that we have not saved, we can select them and then go to Open to open them in Word (or Excel or Powerpoint ) and then edit and save them with name in a folder of our choice.

These documents are all in . ASD but can be found by helping us with the name and the date of the modification.