Recover an Unsaved PowerPoint

Computers don’t always work the way they’re supposed to. Nothing is more frustrating than when a program locks up and stops responding, or worse, completely crashes—especially if you lose progress on an important presentation that you’re working on.

Fortunately, PowerPoint will try to automatically save backup copies of your presentations. If PowerPoint 2019 encounters a problem and stops responding, you can restart PowerPoint or your computer and try to recover your lost presentations.

Recover a Presentation

1. Following a crash, restart PowerPoint.

   If an unsaved presentation can be recovered, a Recover unsaved presentations heading will appear on the Welcome screen.

2. Click Recover unsaved presentations.
   

   The Document Recovery pane appears, listing all recovered presentations that were found.

3. Select the presentation from the Document Recovery pane.

   The last autosaved version of that presentation opens.

4. Click Close.
   

The Document Recovery pane closes, and you can get back to work.

AutoRecovery Settings

You can further protect your work by using the AutoRecover feature to periodically save a temporary copy of the presentation you're working on. To recover work after a software failure, you must have turned on the AutoRecover feature before the problem occurred. You can set the AutoRecover save interval to occur more frequently than its default setting of every 10 minutes.

1. Click the File tab.
   
2. Click Options.
   
3. Click Save.
4. Make sure the Save AutoRecover information check box is checked.
5. Adjust the time interval.

   You can’t specify the interval if the check box is not selected.

6. Click OK.
   

Even with PowerPoint’s recovery features, the best way to ensure that you don’t lose much progress is to save your work regularly.