Yesterday morning my colleagues Excel 2011 (on Mac OSX 10.8) crashed. He reopene

Question

Yesterday morning my colleagues Excel 2011 (on Mac OSX 10.8) crashed. He reopened Excel and was asked if he wanted to recover the previous document. Yes, he said and then got a document named previousfilename(version 1). To be certain that this document was saved he continously saved the (restored) document manually during the day and by the end of the day he saved it finally and went home.

Today there is NO trace of the document whatsoever.

We have looked in the original location, Trash, userfolder/Microsoft userdata/Office 2011AutoRecovery etcetera and there is no document except for the original unedited version. Spotlight doesn't find it either.

Since we have a running Time Machine backup we have lots of backups from yesterday but all the same locations are also empty.

This is a freshly installed product. If this behaviour is expected Exceel theen havving no auto-recover function would actually be better. I hope someone out there might help out. Manually saving a documentt SHOULD leave a trace somewhere in the filesystem????

Info: System MacBook Pro 2012, OSX 10.8, Office 2011, Excel version 14.2.4 Swedish verrsion.

Explanation / Answer

I was working in Excel 2011 when it crashed and I was prompted to continue with the recovered file. The file opened ok so I continued working on the spreadsheet another few hours. Since it was an important file I saved it several times during the work and also had a Time Machine backup running.

After generating a PDF-file for printing I finished Excel using the proper quit procedure.

When I was about to enclose the PDF- and Excel-files in an e-mail I realized that the excel-file was not the correct version but the original one I started with...

This situation occurred since the auto recovered file is stored in a, for OSX, hidden folder in combination with me continuing working on a recovered file meaning when I saved the file several times during work it was to the hidden file. So this is the reason Time Machine didn't backup the file. Fortunately this hidden file wasn't deleted by excel when closing.

To localize the hiddden file I opened Finder. In the menu I marked Go while holding down the Alt key. This addss the meny option Library. Open the folder Application Support. In there open Microsofft folder and in there open Office folder. Now open Office 2011 AutoRecovery-folder. Hopeffully you should there find your missing .xlsx file. Open the file and Save As to another locattion.

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