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Where is my Excel file?

  • 4 respostas
  • 1 has this problem
  • 13 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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Excel crashed at work, in disgust I sent two .xlsx files to my home email address to work on them from there.

Once home I opened the email@gmail containing both of the files I had sent to myself. From within the email, I clicked on the "download" option.

A Firefox popup appears (as expected) and it asks "What should Firefox do with this file?".

The radio button is selected to Open with ~Microsoft Excel (default)~ in the dropdown as a default. Yay! That's exactly what I want to do. I opened the spreadsheets and spend the next three hours working on one spreadsheet -- I literally hit the little file icon to force a save about 20382 times because of what happened at work. I only used the second worksheet for reference and as a source of data (e.g. not making any updates to it, not "saving" it)

WHERE IS THE EXCEL FILE I UPDATED AND SAVED? It seems to have vanished. It is not on my hard drive, it is not on my OneDrive. What scares me the most is that the file is not even LISTED in Excel as a worksheet that I've recently worked on.

When I look at my download History in Firefox, I can SEE that it was a download ... but the Open Containing Folder option is greyed out / cannot be selected.

Any ideas? or was this a total waste of a Wednesday for me and my boss's data??

Excel crashed at work, in disgust I sent two .xlsx files to my home email address to work on them from there. Once home I opened the email@gmail containing both of the files I had sent to myself. From within the email, I clicked on the "download" option. A Firefox popup appears (as expected) and it asks "What should Firefox do with this file?". The radio button is selected to Open with ~Microsoft Excel (default)~ in the dropdown as a default. Yay! That's exactly what I want to do. I opened the spreadsheets and spend the next three hours working on one spreadsheet -- I literally hit the little file icon to force a save about 20382 times because of what happened at work. I only used the second worksheet for reference and as a source of data (e.g. not making any updates to it, not "saving" it) WHERE IS THE EXCEL FILE I UPDATED AND SAVED? It seems to have vanished. It is not on my hard drive, it is not on my OneDrive. What scares me the most is that the file is not even LISTED in Excel as a worksheet that I've recently worked on. When I look at my download History in Firefox, I can SEE that it was a download ... but the Open Containing Folder option is greyed out / cannot be selected. Any ideas? or was this a total waste of a Wednesday for me and my boss's data??

All Replies (4)

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When you directly open a file it's in temporary storage and you have to click Save As.. in Excel in order to save it.

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The file may still be on you e-mail unless you deleted it. Check the trash folder,

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Usually, Open uses the TEMP folder. You could try a deleted file recovery program to see whether you can rescue it:

https://www.piriform.com/recuva

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You should always use Save As to save the file in a different folder and possibly under another name if you directly open the file in a specific application to avoid such a dataloss.