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:
- 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 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:
- Launch PowerPoint, 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:
i. Click the Open option to review the recovered version of the file
ii. Click the Save As option to rename and create a new version of the file
iii. Click the Delete option to delete any recovered version(s) of the file
iv. 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.
- Save and keep any recovered file that you want.
Recovering Presentations Manually
Note that when you open PowerPoint, the Document Recovery Task Pane does not always 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 see this list of presentations manually outside the
Document Recovery Task Pane, follow these steps:
- Within PowerPoint 2010, access the File menu, and choose Options, as
highlighted in red 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 (highlighted
in red within Figure 3) option is selected. Scroll down to the
Save presentations section to find the AutoRecover file location (highlighted in
blue within Figure 3) option.
Figure 3: PowerPoint Options dialog box
- Copy the AutoRecover file location folder path highlighted in blue
within Figure 3, above. And close the PowerPoint Options dialog box.
- Now, access the File | Open option, this brings up the Open
dialog box, as shown in Figure 4. Notice the area highlighted in red
within Figure 4, below, just click on this area and paste the previously copied
AutoRecover file location folder path.
Figure 4: Open dialog box
- You can now see all the files and folders with the AutoRecover file location folder path, as
shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: AutoRecover file location directory path within Open dialog box
- Within the Open dialog box click the button (highlighted in red
within Figure 5, above) to bring up a drop-down list, as shown in Figure 6.
Within the drop-down list make sure you select the "All Files" option.
Figure 6: Choose All Files option
- This will show all the .tmp, .pptx and other files within the Open dialog box, as shown in
Figure 7. You can select the file and open to recover them. Make sure you check within all
sub-folders for any file.
Figure 7: Files within the Open dialog box
See Also:
Recovering Unsaved Presentations in
PowerPoint 2016 for Windows
Recovering Unsaved Presentations in
PowerPoint 2013 for Windows
