How to Recover Deleted Excel XLSX and XLS Files?

XLSX and XLS files are the standard extension for the modern Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files. They always convey important information.  But we may sometimes delete the XLSX and XLS files by mistake. Or we may lose the XLSX and XLS files with system errors, etc. What should you do if you lost the important XLSX and XLS files? This article will show you the best solutions to recover deleted Excel XLSX and XLS files.

1. Recover deleted Excel XLSX and XLS files from Recycle Bin

As soon as you delete the XLSX/XLS files, the first thing you need to do is to check if they are in Recycle Bin.

If they are in there, right-click on the file and choose “Restore”. And then you will restore the files back to its original location.

If you permanently delete the Excel files by “Shift” + “Delete” or emptying the Recycle Bin, it will be harder to find the lost *.xlsx/*.xls files. You need to get help from some third-party Excel file recovery software, such as RecoverXData.

2. Recover deleted Excel XLSX and XLS files with RecoverXData

RecoverXData is very easy-to-use. And it’s very effective to recover deleted excel files. Here are the steps.

Step 1: Download and install RecoverXData from the official website.

For Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP

Step 2: Choose the right scene that you lost your data. If you lost the data by emptying Recycle Bin, you can choose “Recovery for emptied Recycle bin”. If you deleted the XLSX and XLS files by “Shift” + “Delete”, you can choose “Recovery for deleted data”.  And then you can start the scanning.

Step 3: In the scanning result, go to File type >> Files >> xlsx or xls. And then you can find the found Excel files. You can either tick the specific files or choose the whole folder and recover.

Nots:

1. Don’t install the software into the partition or folder where the Excel files are lost.
2. Don’t save the recovered files back to where they are lost, or there will be errors.

3. Recover deleted Excel XLSX and XLS files from previous version

If you are using Windows 10 and you’ve enabled the file backup function before you deleted the Excel files, you can use the following steps to recover.

Step 1. Right-click on the folder where you lost your XLSX/XLS files, and choose Properties.

Step 2. Go to the “Previous versions” tab and check if the lost Excel files are in the list. If yes, tick the right version you hope to restore.

Step 3. Click “Restore” and specify where to save the recovered *.xlsx or *.xls files.

Conclusion:

To lost data has never been a good experience and no one would like to face it again. So it is always better to “prevent lost” than to “recover”. In that case, it’s highly recommended to do backup frequently and enable the file backup function if you are using Windows 10. And besides, if you deleted the important Excel files by accident, you can follow the above 3 ways to recover deleted Excel XLSX and XLS files easily.

If you lost PDF files and hope to recover, please refer to “How to recover deleted PDF files on Windows?“.