By Roger Fingas Thursday, January 18, 2018, 11:01 am PT (02:01 pm ET)
Office 2016 for Mac is available for Office 365 and Volume Licensing customers. The new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote provide the best of both worlds for Mac users: the familiar Office experience paired with the best of Mac. Imagine what people are going through on shared files. Two people open an Excel file on One Drive or Sharepoint, and the time stamp changes, even though neither made a single change, but the file.
Microsoft on Thursday released a major update of Offce 2016 for the Mac, adding features such as real-time collaboration and automatic saves for cloud-based files.
In Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, the 16.9 update displays thumbnails in the upper-right corner, indicating who else is working on a document. In Word and PowerPoint specifically, flag icons show where edits are taking place —PowerPoint will also highlight any modified slides. The new cloud save functions are related, since users can see each others' updates, and roll back to a previous version if someone makes a mistake or otherwise unwanted change.
All three core apps now provide fast access to frequently-used sites and groups through the Open menu. Upgrades exclusive to Excel include new chart types, new functions, easier PivotTable chart modification through filters, and multi-threaded calculation for formulas.
PowerPoint has gained a QuickStarter that generates outlines for topics, even suggesting designs and talking points, and the ability to trim audio and video clips. A mouse can be used as a substitute laser pointer in Slide Show mode. Outlook, finally, has picked up support for Google Calendar and Contacts, and two-finger trackpad gestures for archiving or deleting messages. For Office owners, the new software can be downloaded by going into the Help menu of any app in the suite and selecting 'Check for Updates.'
Need to recover an “unsaved” Excel file from your hard drive? Hoping it was saved by your “Autosave” feature? If you haven’t done anything else to the file yet, it should still be there waiting for you.
I followed the steps here to retrieve my file.
The below post just offers additional tips to ensure you’re able to retrieve unsaved files from your Excel in the future, too.
My Scenario: The Unsaved Excel File
I downloaded an Excel spreadsheet from my bank, saving it to my computer only once, during the initial download.
After working on it for hours and failing to manually save it again, I accidentally clicked “Don’t Save” when closing the file to log off for the night.
I panicked and immediately reopened the file to see if the little “recover” message would be there at the top like it is when your computer crashes and you’re working on an Office document.
But nothing!
All I had was the original, unmodified file staring me in the face.
I didn’t try to make any changes at all to my file at that point. I just closed it right away.
The next time I logged onto the computer, I ventured to Google to see if I could find a fix for my Friday flub. Thankfully, I was able to!
Note: In my case, I had an original version of the file that I’d saved to my hard drive.
Important File Recovery Prerequisites:
Because I type 100+ WPM and can add a LOT of data to a file quickly, I have my Excel AutoRecover set to save every 1 minute.
Setting a short autorecover time ensures the least data loss with any potential screw-up such as this.
Note: If you didn’t already have the two above boxes checked in your MS Excel installation, the steps in the next article won’t work.
So if you’ve saved your file at least once and seek to retrieve the latest changes, here’s how:
1.Open the original version of the file. It won’t yet show your latest changes. Don’t worry.
2. While viewing that open file, go to the “File” tab in Excel. (I use Microsoft Excel 2010. Your interface may look different and instructions may differ slightly from the below.)
3. Look under the last heading, “Versions,” and click “Manage Versions.”
4. You should see a message that says, “Recent version from 6:11PM (or whenever) when I didn’t save my file.” If so, click on it and see if that’s the version you need. If not, continue to…
5. Click “Recover Unsaved Workbooks.”
Important: If you don’t FIRST open your file, you won’t be able to manage any versions of it (because you haven’t opened a file to manage versions of).
If, however, you have opened your file and still don’t see any unsaved versions… maybe your Excel isn’t set to save your files in a short enough interval. ;( In that case, try this AutoRecover tutorial by ExcelEasy.
Again, they helped me retrieve the latest version of my unsaved Excel file!