How To Recover Microsoft Office Documents

DiskInternals Office Recovery has been specially designed to allow any computer user to carry out their own data recovery of lost or deleted Microsoft Office documents.

There are three versions of the software.

Office Recovery, the premium edition, is capable of recovering almost all types of Microsoft Office document.
Word Recovery is lower priced and is intended only for recovering Microsoft Word documents.
Excel Recovery is similarly low priced and may only be used to recover Microsoft Excel documents.

The tutorial illustrates the recovery procedure using Office Recovery. However, the process is exactly the same using Word Recovery or Excel Recovery. Only the file types that can be recovered are different.

Before you start

The recovery software must be installed on your computer. Ideally, it should not be installed on the same drive you wish to recover data from. These recovery utilities are not large programs, but their installation might overwrite the blocks of disk space containing the data you want to recover!

For the same reason, you should not save any recovered files to the same drive you are recovering them from. An external drive or network drive would be a suitable location. If you don't have access to another drive then a USB memory stick would be an inexpensive substitute. Do not attempt to save recovered files to a CD-RW or similar optical disk as the data for these drives is often cached on the main hard drive before writing.

Start recovery

Start the recovery software. When the welcome screen appears, click Next.

Select the drive containing the documents or files that have been lost. Note that you can select drives both by partition (logical drive, denoted by a drive letter) or as a physical disk. It is normally only necessary to access a drive as a physical disk if the file system is corrupted and the drive is inaccessible to Windows.

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After you have made your selection, click Next. Then wait while the software scans the drive. As it finds recoverable files, it displays details of the last file found and shows a small preview of it.

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Examine the results

On completion of the scan, the recovery software shows a list of all the recoverable Microsoft Office documents found. To see a preview of any file, select it by clicking on its name in the list. You can resize the window to see the preview better. To change the way the file list is displayed, click Settings.

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To display the selected document in a separate preview window click Preview. To see information about the selected file click Properties.

To make it easier to find the files you want to recover, you can use Filters. Filters restrict the files that are displayed to those that meet the criteria you specify, such as:

Text - text contained in the document;
Title - text contained in the document title;
Author - the author's name;
Document type - the specific Microsoft Office file type;
Size - the size of the file;
Modification date - the time that the lost file was last changed.

Recovering documents

Select the files to be recovered by ticking the box beside each one. Then click Recover. If you are using a trial version, you will need to purchase a license key to enable the ability to save recovered files.

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Select a destination folder for the recovered documents. As mentioned at the start of the tutorial, this should not be the same drive you are recovering the data from.

That's all there is to it!

Download Office Recovery | Download Word Recovery | Download Excel Recovery