How to recover an unsaved PowerPoint in Windows 11

More than once it has happened to us to be working on a document, for example, a PowerPoint, and, through carelessness, error or accident, close the program without saving the changes made. Should we simply resign ourselves to having lost all our work? Nothing of the sort. We explain to you how to recover an unsaved PowerPoint in Windows 11 and thus solve the problem.

The trick we explain in this post is something that anyone who regularly uses PowerPoint for their slide presentations (whether student or professional) should know. Above all, because it is something that can save us a lot of trouble and the frustration that comes from thinking that we have worked in vain.

Losing a PowerPoint document without having saved it is something that, unfortunately, can happen to anyone. The good news is that the Microsoft office suite has a quite effective method to recover deleted files. And not only in PowerPoint, but also for Word or Excel documents.

Let's see what we can do in those cases. We have four different ways to recover an unsaved PowerPoint in Windows 11, which we analyze below:

“Undo” function

The first on our list of solutions can be applied the moment we realize that we have deleted the document without having saved it first. To achieve a quick recovery, we can use the "Undo" function.

This is how to proceed: Right after accidentally deleting a file, you have to use the key combination Ctrl + Z. This is used to execute the Undo function and recover the file.

It should be said that We will only be able to use this resource in very specific situations: when we have not exited the program and if the "deletion" has been relatively recent. Still, it's a handy trick worth knowing. For more complex cases, it is better to try one of the methods explained below.

Windows Temporary Folder

Although many users ignore it, Windows contains a special folder where temporary files are saved and the most recent data that has been used on the equipment. Generally, files of little importance accumulate there (such as cache elements) that should be deleted to avoid running out of storage space. But there we can also find what we need to recover an unsaved PowerPoint that has been deleted.

If not too much time has passed, there is a good chance that document is still there. This is what you have to do to recover it:

1. First we must open the Windows Explorer.
2. Then we click on the option "Watch". 
3. select "Show".
4. In the dropdown menu, we will "Hidden elements".
5. Then we click "This team" and double click on the folder "Users".
6. In the folder marked with our username we go to the file "AppData".
7. There we select the folder "Roaming".
8. Then you have to access the Microsoft folder and, from there, the Power point.
9. Finally, we look for the Temporary files (they are marked with the .tmp extension and organized by date) and, when we find the one that interests us, we change its extension to .ppt or .pptx to be able to open it with PowerPoint.

recovery tool of presentations not saved in PowerPoint

Another practical method to recover an unsaved PowerPoint in Windows 11 is run the unsaved presentation recovery tool in PowerPoint. This is a PowerPoint feature that can come to our rescue when we need it most. This is how it can be used:

1. To begin with, we start PowerPoint on our PC.
2. Then we click on the tab Archive.
3. We select the Open option and click on the section "Recent".
4. There, at the bottom of the screen, is the option that we must click on: «Recover unsaved presentations». 
5. Doing this opens the folder Drafts, which contains the file that was not saved and that we can recover by simply double-clicking on it.

PowerPoint Auto-Save Feature

One last trick, rather a recommendation, is activate the function of auto-save PowerPoint. When this function is activated, it is the program itself that saves the work that is done from time to time, creating a series of copies to resort to if necessary (when the PC turns off, we close PowerPoint accidentally, the program closes without warning, etc.).

These are the steps to follow to activate this practical feature:

1. In the current PowerPoint presentation, we access the tab Archive.
2. From there, we will Options.
3. In the new box that opens, we click on "Save".
4. At this point it is necessary to check the following two boxes:
   • “Save AutoRecover information every X minutes” (the option we prefer, for example, every 2 minutes).
   • "Keep the latest version automatically recovered when you close without saving."
5. After that, we copy the location of the autosave file that we must copy into the address bar of the File Browser.
6. To finish, we send the file to the desktop, changing its extension to .ppt or .pptx.