I am no stranger to Excel and Tech in general, however this stumped me! This all occurred on the corporate laptop where we connect to the network remotely using a security token ID. Any help is extremely appreciated as I would hate to have to do hours of re-work. Adulting is hard.

I was working in an Excel spreadsheet, when suddenly the Excel application started glitching. Any updates to a given cell would not immediately reflect. I could only view the change after toggling to a different tab and returning to the tab with the updated cell. Instead of clicking the Save button, I clicked the Exit button on the Excel file as I know a pop-up would be triggered if changes were made since the most recent save. The file closed with no pop-ups, so I figured that was because I had already recently saved the file which I remember doing. I then rebooted the laptop, logged in again with new token as we do each time, expecting to see all my updates when re-opening the file. Especially because the time stamp of the file clearly indicated the moment right before the reboot. But the file had completely reverted to the original state! I even checked many other local folders including Downloads, Documents, Desktop. I checked the Recent Files panel within the Excel file but all versions were also in original state. I looked for the Auto-recovery panel but none was available.

I’m panicking as I’m really in a bind and time crunch. I considered consulting our IT team but they are usually so slow and would most likely be too late, if they can even recover the updated file. Is it possible to recover the updated file in general now? What was the issue in this series of events, and what would have been the best solution? Any other advice or insight to help me out? Thank you all!