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I was working on an Excel file which I had saved earlier when my MacBook crashed (several hours between manual Save, extremely repentant at the moment). With help from another thread (Locating Autorecover files Excel 2011 doesn't find), I have been able to locate the AutoSave to myfile.xlsx in the ~Users/myAccount/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery folder.

Here is the problem: I can see the excel files ONLY in the Terminal but not in the Finder. In Finder I see only the MS Word AutoRecovery files. I tried copying the file I need using Terminal to my Desktop but then again I see it only in Terminal, and cannot open it.

ls -la gives (only myfile shown among many)

-rw-r--r--@ 1 myAccount 444659088 52963 Jun 30 17:15 AutoSave to 71360362myfile.xlsx

Upon recommendation, I also tried this:

Office 2011 AutoRecovery myAccount$ cat "AutoSave to myfile.xlsx" > /dev/null

which gives: -bash:  /dev/null: No such file or directory

I'm using MS Office 2011 on Mac OS X (10.9.5). Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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gsingh
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1 Answers1

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I have managed to find a solution to my problem. The key was to unhide the hidden files in the Office 2011 AutoRecovery directory. Got the hint from this blogpost (http://www.technonerdsblog.com/blog/autorecover-file-saves-the-day-a-personal-experience).

To unhide the files, I executed the following command on Terminal: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

Once I did this, I closed all Finder windows and opened a new Finder window. To access the ~Users/myAccount/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery, I clicked on GO in the top menubar and pressed the alt/option key. This shows the Library shortcut as long as the alt/option key is pressed. Now in the Office 2011 AutoRecovery directory I can see the AutoSave to myfile.xlsx file (and all autosave files for .xlsx files but they are still greyed out I guess indicating that they are hidden).

I copied the latest version of the autosave file I needed to my desktop and changed extension from .xlsx to .xlsb (the autosave file is in a binary format and MS excel will read it only with .xlsb extension). And here was my 6+ hours of work back!!!

gsingh
  • 21