Recovering Unsaved Presentations in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Imagine this situation: you started working on a presentation, saved it couple of times, then got so much involved in your work that you spent an inordinate amount of time working on it without saving it. Then, your computer unexpectedly crashes or just shuts off due to some unexpected crisis. Or maybe just PowerPoint crashes for some reason. Does it mean you are now left with your presentation in the status when you last saved it and lost all your work? Not really because you can restart PowerPoint, and one of two occurrences may happen:

PowerPoint starts with opening the presentation file, so you can save any salvaged work and continue using your file.
The Document Recovery Task Pane appears, with up to three autosaved versions of your file. You can select which version you want to keep.

Note: To see the options mentioned above, you must have AutoRecover or AutoSave options turned on, and you should also ensure that the save interval is sufficiently set to save your work frequently.

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

Launch PowerPoint 2016 and you may see the Document Recovery Task Pane, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Document Recovery Task Pane
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.

There are four options available within the list, which are explained below:

Click the Open option to review the recovered version of the file

Click the Save As option to rename and create a new version of the file

Click the Delete option to delete any recovered version(s) of the file

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 proceed.
Save and keep any recovered file that you want.

Recovering Presentations Manually

Another possibility of losing your work done on your presentation is if you close the presentation in a hurry, ignoring PowerPoint's warning to save it (which is almost impossible). Note that in this case when you re-open PowerPoint, the Document Recovery Task Pane won't appear. And if you need to see presentations within the Document Recovery Task Pane, there really isn't an intuitive way to launch it. To access this list of autosaved presentations manually without Document Recovery Task Pane, follow these steps:

Launch PowerPoint 2016, access the File menu, and choose Options, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 2.

Figure 2: Choose File | Options
This brings up the PowerPoint Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 3. Within the PowerPoint Options dialog box's sidebar, make sure that the Save option (highlighted in red within Figure 3) is selected. Locate the AutoRecover file location box (highlighted in blue within Figure 3).

Figure 3: PowerPoint Options dialog box
Copy the AutoRecover file location folder path (highlighted in blue within Figure 3, above). Close the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
Now, access the Backstage view, select the Open option, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 4. Then select the This PC option, highlighted in red within Figure 4. Finally click the Browse button (highlighted in green within Figure 4).

Figure 4: Browse button
This brings up the Open dialog box, as shown in Figure 5. Notice the area highlighted in red within Figure 5, below. Within this area paste the previously copied AutoRecover file location folder path.

Figure 5: Open dialog box
Now, within the Open dialog box you can see the names of all presentations that were open in the last session of PowerPoint, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 6. But as you can notice, there are folders instead of PowerPoint files. Just double-click on the folder that shows the name of the presentation you want to recover.

Figure 6: AutoRecover file location opened within Open dialog box
This will show all the recoverable autosaved (and also unsaved) versions of the selected presentation, as shown in Figure 7. Select the file and click the Open button to recover it.

Figure 7: Files within the Open dialog box
This will open the selected presentation in PowerPoint as shown in Figure 8. You will see a strip above the Slide Area to indicate the fact that this is a recovered presentation. Just click the Restore button (shown highlighted in red within Figure 8) to save it as original file. A window will show confirming that you are overwriting the last saved version. Click the OK button in the window to accept.

Figure 8: Recovered unsaved file

Note: If you have lost any presentation that was not even saved once, that presentation will be autosaved in a different location. To learn how to recover the presentations that were not even saved once, explore our Recovering New Unsaved Presentations Manually in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows tutorial.