How to Recover Deleted Spreadsheets

Accidentally deleting an Excel worksheet with important business data inputs definitely is a headache. Fortunately, Excel and Windows have a number of built-in features that might be able to help you recover the lost worksheet. Even if all hope seems lost, we can still try 3rd party data recovery software to retrieve permanently deleted spreadsheets.

First of all, we should always check the recycle bin. The Recycle Bin is the place where we can find the deleted files before permanently deleted from the system. You can restore any file from the Recycle Bin: right click the file and select “Restore”. If you can’t find it in the recycle bin, you can try to find your document in the computer folder with temporary files. Look for files with the extension .tmp. Note that the file name will not be the same as the original document. Therefore, you should search by the date and time of the last edit. It is also important to know that the names of temporary files begin with the character ~.

Some of the newer versions of Office program come with the auto-recovery feature. When you restart Word or Excel, a panel appears on the left with all the files that were lost without saving. Select the file you are looking for from the list, open and save it. If files do not appear when you start the program in the left pane, you can search for auto-repair files manually. In Word, click the “File” menu and select “Recent.” In the menu, select “Recover unsaved documents”. Find your file in Windows Explorer.

If all these methods did not help, then to restore the file you can use 3rd party data recovery software for recovering office documents or spreadsheets. H Data Recovery recovers Word documents, spreadsheets and other files created in Microsoft Office applications such as Word and Excel, as well as documents created in OpenOffice and Adobe PDF. The program can recover DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, RTF, ODT OpenOffice, Adobe PDF files and more than a dozen other document formats. Make sure that you don’t install the program to the same drive that you are trying to recover from. This will help prevent the overwriting of the file, as a result of which it will be lost forever.

Step 1. Free download the spreadsheet recovery software. You can choose to free trial the software to test the recovery capability for no charge.

Step 2. Install and Launch H Data Recovery Software and you will see the 6 modules designed for different data loss situations.

Step 3. Choose an appropriate module according to your data loss cause, whether it is accidental deletion/virus deletion, lost partition or emptied Recycle Bin. If you are not sure, try our new feature “Universal Recovery”. It is a special module that scans deeper and quicker into the file structure and locates all deleted files.

Step 4. When scanning is done, you will be able to see all the files that can be recovered. Use the search bar to narrow down the files by entering the extension or file names. Check the files you wish to recover and click Next to select a location to save these files. We suggest that you save these recovered files in another drive or another partition to avoid overwriting.