How to undo a save in Excel?

Here is how I saved some months of my own work. If you accidentally hit Save instead of Save As and want to restore a previously saved version of your work:

1. Go to the files location in your folder, right-click, go to properties and restore previous versions.
2. You should see some earlier save dates you can choose from. These previous versions are called Shadow Copies. Your computer should do them automatically. You can also edit the rate at which your files are shadow copied.

Today, I was able to go back to a previous version of an Excel file in Windows 7 Enterprise. This trick might work for other versions of Windows as well. I am using Excel 2016 and this might work for Word, PowerPoint, Access. Any MS Office programs maybe.

1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. Select your main hard drive, C: on most computers.
3. Then enter part or all of the file name into search. The results should include files in "Recent Items" (Folder name C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows on my computer) or just "Recent" (Folder C:\Users\username).
4. Open the file you want to go back to and then save it as a new file name (maybe add a "1" or "New" to the file name.)
5. Now you can go back to the one you saved incorrectly. Do "Save As" to the file name you really wanted. Then save the newly recovered file with the original file name if you want.

For future reference I would suggest developing a backup routine. You could do this in so many ways. A friend of mine is sysadmin for a local ISP and his routine is something of a ridiculous redundancy, but very little data is lost ever. You could adjust this to fit your needs/schedule.

1. All backups are done on a separate hard drive dedicated for archiving. However if you are just needing some of your work archived I don't think that a separate drive is necessary.
2. Create a folder called backups. This is the top level of all archives. Then have sub folders, daily, weekly, and monthly.
3. Save a copy of your file in the daily archives as the filename-date.
4. At the end of the week make a zip of the daily archives and store that in the weekly sub folder and name it the beginning/ending dates.
5. At the end of the month make a zip of the weekly archives in the monthly sub folder. Eventually you will need to dump to CD.

I know this is somewhat redundant but its all in the name of: DOH I should have had a backup!

I just recently lost all of my art work that I had been saving since 1997. It was 2 Gigabytes worth of images and God only knows how many man hours I lost. The sad thing is I used to have backups of all of that, this is how come I still had stuff from 1997. But the last copy of my backups got `86d a year ago and I just haven't had it in me really to even bother to try to create anything anymore.

I don't know if this helped, but I hope it did. Sorry to hear about your loss. 😱

You still have a chance to undo it, but I'm not sure if it will work. Find out the .tmp files in your office folder, try rename them to .xls, then open it. Sometimes it works, good luck!

By the way, the .tmp files are automatic backups in Office.

If the Excel sheet is still open, do the following:

1. Save the new work you just created with a new name/description.
2. Then press the undo arrow until you are back to the beginning of the original document. Save as (select original document and re-write).