How to Recover a Draft in Word 2016

Word 2010 For Dummies

You can recover some — but perhaps not all — of an unsaved document in Word 2016. When you forget to save a document, or the computer crashes, or the power goes out, valiantly make this attempt:

Press Ctrl+O to summon the Open screen.
Ensure that Recent is chosen as the file location.
Click the Recover Unsaved Documents button, found at the bottom of the list of recent files.

You may have to scroll the list of recent files a bit to locate the button

The Open dialog box appears, listing the contents of a special folder, UnsavedFiles. It's Word's graveyard of sorts. Actually, it's more like a morgue in a county with a lousy EMS.
Click to select a document to recover.

The document may have an unusual name, especially when it has never been saved.
Click the Open button to open and recover the document.

The document you recover might not be the one you wanted it to be. If so, try again and choose another document.

You might also find that the recovered document doesn't contain all the text you typed or thought would be there. You can't do anything about it, other than remembering to save everything in the first place!

The recovery of drafts is possible because of Word's AutoRecover feature.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.