Last week, I spent two days in designing my PowerPoint presentations with great shapes, animations, images, tables, word art, basic shapes, stars, etc. Unfortunately, my PowerPoint crashed and unsaved, I didn’t have extra time to make such a valuable PowerPoint again. How can I recover unsaved PowerPoint on Mac?
Many users have similar problems, and I am not the exception.
To recover PowerPoint file that not saved on Mac or lost for unknown reason, there are 7 ways, no matter you want to recover unsaved or deleted PowerPoint on Mac in Office 2018, 2019 or the latest 2021 version. Also, to cover all the topics about PowerPoint recovery on Mac, we include the solutions to recover previous version of PowerPoint on Mac in case of needs.
Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac
Free Download macOS 10.11 or later You can choose a third-party PowerPoint recovery software to recover unsaved or deleted PowerPoint file on Mac. As long as the PPT document has not been overwritten yet, there's hope of recovering them sucessfully.
Cisdem Data Recovery will be a good choice for you as it is effective in PPT recovery no matter which PowerPoint version you are running. It is the best data recovery software for Mac which can recover files such as office document files, pictures, videos, etc from Mac hard drive and other external storage devices.
Why Choose Cisdem Data Recovery?
You can download and install this PowerPoint recovery software on Mac. It’s free to try it. Then follow the below guide to start your unsaved or deleted PowerPoint recovery job.
Free Download macOS 10.11 or later 
If you cannot find the unsaved PowerPoint files in the Unsaved Documents folder, you can go directly to Type > Documents > PPTX or PPT folder to search file by name, size, date.
Also, you can check out the following video tutorial (start from 01:26)
What is PowerPoint AutoSave?
Microsoft Office has a fantastic feature called AutoSave, which is built in to automatically save a temporary PowerPoint copy on a periodic basis. The feature is turned on by default and the default save interval is 10 minutes. That is to say, not only limited to Microsoft Office PowerPoint, Office Word and Excel are also featured with an AutoSave, for the purpose to restore office files when accidents happen.
How to Enable or Disable PowerPoint AutoSave on Mac?
By default, the AutoSave feature is ON in Microsoft Office. However, to make sure if you can recover PowerPoint files that not saved on Mac with AutoSave, you can check if the feature is enabled, or enable/disable according to your needs.
Where is the PowerPoint AutoRecovery folder on a Mac?
For Office 2018:
/Users
For Office 2019 & 2021:
/Users/username/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/PowerPoint
The amount of new information that the recovered PPT file contains depends on how frequently a Microsoft Office program saves the recovery file. For example, if the recovery file is saved only every 15 minutes, your recovered PPT file won't contain your last 14 minutes of work before the power failure or other problem occurred. And you can also use above method to recover word document on Mac and recover excel files not saved.
Alternatively, if the PowerPoint app goes through an unexpected shutdown when Autosave feature is initialed properly, there’s another option to get back the unsaved PowerPoint slides possibly. Check out the tutorial below to manually recover an unsaved PPT file:
If you didn’t configure AutoSave in your Office PowerPoint or couldn't find the unsaved PowerPoint files by following above method, then the last thing you can do is to check your temporary folder. If you are lucky enough, maybe you can find and recover unsaved PowerPoint files on Mac. Here are steps to locate PowerPoint temp files on Mac.
Also, you may run into a situation that you leave the PowerPoint file unsaved and it even disappeared on your Mac. If you have enabled AutoSave in PowerPoint, it is still possible to recover the disappeared PowerPoint file on Mac.
If you still cannot recover the unsaved PowerPoint files even you have tried all above-mentioned methods, or you just lost/delete the files by accident, there are extra 2 ways to restore them.
If you are new to using Mac, you may be not aware of the fact that all the deleted files are just moved to the Trash, if you want to permanently deleted the files, you will need to manually delete in Trash. So, it is possible to recover lost or deleted PowerPoint files in Mac Trash.
If you have a good habit to back up files regularly on online storage services, you can recover lost or deleted PowerPoint files on Mac via backups.
Time Machine is a Mac utility to back up all kinds of files onto an external hard drive. If you have turned the Time Machine ON, you can recover lost or deleted PowerPoint on Mac easily.
Also, if you have backed up files in other storage service, you can recover via those backups, the steps are quite similar.
You may want to recover a previous version of PowerPoint on Mac, and there are 3 ways to get to the previous version of a PowerPoint file.
If you have sent the PowerPoint file before and edited later, you can get back to the receiver of your previous PowerPoint file, ask for a copy and rename it.
Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac has a feature called “Browse Version History”, by which you are allowed to view and restore a specific ealier version of the PPT file. Follow the steps below.
As we mentioned before, Time Machine can help to recover lost or deleted files via backup. Also, it is capable of restoring previous version of a PowerPoint file on Mac.
Although it is always recommended to periodically save your PowerPoint files to avoid any kind of data loss, however if you haven’t been very diligent in saving your work or have suffered from events such as a system crash that may cause data loss, then you can follow the above mentioned process to recover unsaved PowerPoint files and get all lost PPT files back by using Cisdem Data Recovery. Last but not least, always click the "Save" button after you make any change to your PPT presentation.
Connie has been writing for Mac productivity and utility apps since 2009. Each review and solution is based on her practical tests, she is aways energetic and trustworthy in this field.
Brice
Felt so panic when unsaving my important powerpoint files yesterday. AutoSave introduced here is a nice feature. Through it my files were rescued!
Andrew J. Manuse
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You saved my day's worth of work. For whatever reason it wasn't auto-saving, I don't know, but one of your solutions here worked and I have it back. You rule! Thank you. Thank God almighty!
Ching
This app can find the deleted ppt files for me, thanks. Rosa, if I buy one single license, can I get a discount?
Rosa Reyes
Hi, Ching. You can visit its product page to see if there is a discount or not.
Davily322
I have foolishly deleted a powerpoint file accidentally while using a Mac Cleaner app, but thank god, I got it back with this powerful data recovery.
Lucy
What a wonderful data recovery it is! I was working on a very important PPT, and i remembered to save it in a folder. I opened my Mac and the PPT was missing. Then I was looking for a data recovery software on Google and i found Cisdem datarecovery, it recovered the missing PPT.