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Recovering Presentations Automatically in PowerPoint 2010

Author: Geetesh Bajaj

Product/Version: Microsoft PowerPoint 2010
OS: Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / 7

Date Created: September 20th 2012
Date Created: September 20th 2012

Excerpt/Capsule: Learn how to automatically recover your unsaved presentation in PowerPoint 2010.

After spending an inordinate amount of time to create your PowerPoint presentation, your computer unexpectedly crashes or your computer just shuts off due to a power failure. Or maybe just PowerPoint crashes for any number of reasons. Of course, since you had zero warnings, your files were not saved -- you are thus left with the state of your last saved presentation. Not really because you can restart PowerPoint, and one of two occurrences might happen:

1. PowerPoint starts with opening the presentation file, so you can save any salvaged work and continue using your file.
   
2. The Document Recovery task pane appears, with up to three recovered versions of your file. You can identify which version you want to keep -- and the ones you want to discard.
   

Follow these steps to use the Document Recovery task pane to recover your presentation after PowerPoint or your OS crashes:

1. Launch PowerPoint, and you may see the Document Recovery task pane, as shown in Figure 1.
   
   
   Figure 1: Document Recovery task pane
   
   
2. Within the Available files list, click the button with the downward pointing arrow next to the recovered file (highlighted in red within Figure 1) to bring up a drop-down list, as shown in Figure 1.
   
   
3. There are four options available within the list, which are explained below:
   
   
   1. Click the Open option to review the recovered version of the file
   2. Click the Save As option to rename and create a new version of the file
   3. Click the Delete option to delete any recovered version(s) of the file
   4. The Show Repairs option is often grayed out, unless PowerPoint finds a file that's not completely useable -- it then attempts to salvage whatever content it can save -- you can then select the Show Repairs option to learn more about the file repair.
      
      
4. Save and keep any recovered file that you want.