Last Updated on December 8, 2020 by Ian McEwan
The error message “Document not saved” may appear when you try to save an Excel file. Wondering what are the causes of the problem? How to fix the error and how to recover the unsaved excel files? Here are the answers.
Last updated Apr 4th, 2019 by Ian McEwan
Has it ever happened to you that you have been working on an Excel document for hours, then the error message “Document not saved”, “Document not completely saved.” Or “Document not saved. Any previously saved copy has been deleted” appears when you try to save it. And no matter what you do, the current Excel session just cannot save the document.
Alas!
It is so frustrating to lose a file on which you have put a lot of hard work for hours.
The reason why Excel “Document not saved” pop up when saving an Excel is that the Microsoft Excel saving process is interrupted.
Microsoft Excel saving process 123: Every time you work in an Updated Excel file (the previous version was saved), Microsoft Excel will keep a file in the same folder as the original file with a random temporary name. When you save your Excel file, the temp file will be renamed with the original file name and will replace the original file simultaneously.
The interruption of this process will result in “Document not saved” error and having one or more Excel temporary files in the destination folder where you try to save.
The Excel saving process is interrupted due to:
Applies to: Excel 2016, Excel 2013, Excel 2010, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Excel 2019, Excel for Office 365
Here are some possible troubleshooting methods to help you fix the problem.
Method 1: Saving the workbook with a new file name.
Click Save As on the File menu, and save the workbook with a new file name.
Method 2: Save the file as *.htm or *.html or a different Excel file format.
Click Save As on the File menu, and select a file format differ from the current one. To make it works, you can select *.htm , *.html, *.xlsx or *.xlsm.
Method 3: Save the Excel file to a new location, such as Local Disk, OneDrive, or a portable drive.
Method 4: Save Excel file in safe mode.
Click (Windows 7 / Windows 10 )to learn how to restart Windows in safe mode.
Method 5: Try to move the original worksheets to a new workbook.
Note: All the method mentioned above are intended to help you obtain a usable, previous version of the file. However, all the latest changes, feature set and formatting of the Excel Workbook are unsaved.
Although your Excel file crashed or you closed the Excel by mistake without saving the document, there are still some feasible ways to fix this problem and recover the Excel document not saved.
Though there are many ways to recover an unsaved Excel file, Aiseesoft Data Recovery is the most reliable one of them. It works every time. Other methods also require some conditions that you should have followed before you lost your Excel file but Aiseesoft Data Recovery is different. It gives you your unsaved Excel file back no matter what. Having Aiseesoft Data Recovery software by the side is the safest option while working on an Excel file so that you never lose your Excel file if Excel stops working unexpectedly.
This software helps you recover unsaved Excel from crashing, corruption, not working, etc. It supports Excel recovery in the Excel editions 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007 and 2003. With the help of Aiseesoft Data Recovery, you can recover not only Excel document but Word, TXT, RTF, etc too.
It is an inbuilt feature of Excel. It keeps on saving your progress on a document after a specific time period. But you need to make sure that it is running from the Excel settings.
Now that you are sure that Excel AutoRecover is working. This is how you can recover an unsaved Excel file that you lost because your Excel crashed or stopped working unexpectedly.
If you use OneDrive for saving your Excel Documents then you can recover an older version of Excel file from OneDrive. It is very helpful when you are working on an Excel document but realizes that you made a mistake an hour ago. In such a case, you can restore an older version of the Excel document from OneDrive. Just follow the steps given below to save a copy of the desired version of the Excel file on your PC.
You can also restore the previous versions of your Word, Powerpoint, PDF, etc documents using the same way.
This method also works on an inbuilt feature of Excel. Whenever you save a file in the Excel, it also creates a temporary file in the location that you provided in the “Save as” dialog box. Now, if your Excel stops working midway and got closed abnormally, you can recover your Excel file using this Temporary file.
Here is how you can do it.