How to Recover a PowerPoint Document

Microsoft PowerPoint allows you to create full, interactive, graphical presentations for business meetings, classroom assignments, and personal gatherings. It can be very meticulous and time-consuming to work on each PowerPoint slide--you have to type in text, add graphics, and position everything just right. To prevent the disaster of losing all of that work in a program crash, Microsoft has a built-in auto recovery feature.

Things You'll Need

• Computer running PowerPoint

Instructions

Recover After Crash

1. Open PowerPoint again as soon as it closes to view the "Document Recovery" task pane (it's on the left of the screen).

2. Review the options for recovered files along with the dates and times the files were last saved. Click the most recent version of the file and select "Open."

3. Review the file to assure that it contains the majority of your PowerPoint presentation. If some slides are missing, that is because PowerPoint can only recover the last "auto-saved" version of the file. Click "File" and then "Save" to overwrite the original file, or "Save As" to save the file with a new name or in a different location.

4. Click "Close" at the bottom of the Document Recovery task pane and continue working on your presentation.

Recover Corrupted File

1. Try to recover your corrupted PowerPoint file by moving the file to a different folder on your hard drive. Try to open the file again in its new location.

2. Try to retrieve the individual PowerPoint slides if moving the file doesn't work. Click "Insert" then "Slides from Files" and pull up the corrupted file name from the slide finder. You may be able to recover at least a few of your slides this way.

3. Restart your computer in Safe Mode (press F8 repeatedly during reboot until you see the "Advanced Boot Options," then click "Safe Mode") to try to recover the document. Load PowerPoint and attempt to open the PowerPoint presentation in this mode.

Tips & Warnings

• These instructions are specific to Windows operating systems.

References

• Microsoft.com: Recovering Files in Microsoft Office
• Microsoft.com: Recover Corrupt PowerPoint File