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How to Recover a Draft in Word 2013

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Updated:  
2016-03-27 11:42:49
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Computers crash. Users forget to save in a pinch. Or perhaps another type of disaster has befallen your unsaved Word 2013 document. When the planets are properly aligned and the word processing gods are smiling, it’s possible to recover those lost documents, the ones that Word calls drafts. Here’s how:

Click the File tab to view the File screen.

The file screen will appear.

Choose the Open command.

Choose the Open command.

The document will open.

Choose Recent Documents.

Choose Recent Documents.

You see the list of recent documents. When unsaved drafts are available, you see a button at the bottom of the list: Recover Unsaved Documents.

Click the Recover Unsaved Documents button.

Click the Recover Unsaved Documents button.

The Open dialog box appears.

Choose from the list a document to recover.

Choose from the list 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 document doesn’t contain all the text you typed or thought would be there. You can’t do anything about it, other than remember to save everything in the first place!

The recovery of drafts is possible because of Word’s AutoRecover feature

About This Article

This article is from the book: 

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.