Thursday, August 16, 2012

Find And/Or Change Default Location Of Saved Files In Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc.

Most of Windows users come across Microsoft Office applications at times at their work, school or home depending on their needs of work. MS office is one of the most popular softwares used for creating computer documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. One of the common troubles faced by many of the new users is that they don’t know where they saved the file on the computer after working on them for long time!
Imagine you open MS Word on your work or school or home computer, create a word document with lots of text, data pictures and spend good amount of time in making that document. Then you save that document with some name. Then you close MS Word and you realize that you don’t remember in which folder you saved the word document. This is a common problem with new or first time users as they are not very familiar with the software and file saving locations. In this small article, we will share will you some very easy tips to locate the saved files, or even change the default location to a folder of your choice so that you don’t end up searching for your documents after you save them.

How To Locate A File Saved In Microsoft Word, Excel Or PowerPoint?

First of all, when you save a file in Microsoft Office, the default location is usually My Documents or Documents folder for most Windows PCs. But in many cases, it maybe different, before you start following detailed steps, just open the My Documents or Documents folder on windows computer where you saved the file and it might just be lying there silently.

If you don’t find the file in the folder, first you can check in the Recent Files options. For the same, click on File > Recent File. Here all the recent files with their locations are listed.

Recently Edited Files In MS Office

Also you can look at the Recent Places where some files have been saved. For example, in MS word, when you go to File > Open option, you see an option folder window in which you get an option called the Recent Places.

open files in MS Word

In case you don’t see your file in the recent places, which is a possibility when many other files have been saved after you saved your file last time, in that case, follow the below steps.

Step 1: Go to File > Options
 
MS Word Options



Step 2: On word options window, click on the Save tab on the left side pane. On the right hand size, you will see the Default File location. This is most likely the location your file is saved at. Open the location and scroll to find your previously saved MS Word file. You can also use search feature in Windows to search the file at that location.

MS Word Default Location

Step 3: If you want to change the default save location of your MS Word files, you can simply click on the Browse button and select the new folder. Keep a convenient location like desktop or some root folder where you would like all your new documents to be saved and press Ok.

This is it. Same way you can make changes to the MS Excel options and PowerPoint options and check the default file location for the new files saved using MS Excel or MS PowerPoint software.

excel options
power point options

NOTE : The interface may look slightly different in different version of Windows and MS Office, but the functionality is almost the same as this is a fundamental option in all the version of Microsoft Office for Windows.

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