Sometimes, you might accidentally delete the worksheet or even the whole workbook you are working on. This could be a disaster if you are working with important data and have no backup copy of that Excel workbook. In this article, I will show you how to undo delete sheet in Excel.
Let’s assume a scenario where we have an Excel file that contains information about the Annual Salary and Tax Rate of the employees of a company. I will use this Excel workbook to show you how to undo delete sheet in Excel.
1. Making a Copy of Existing Sheet to Undo Delete Sheet in Excel
If you accidentally deleted one or multiple worksheets of your Excel workbook but have not saved the file afterwards, you can still recover the deleted worksheet. The easiest way is to close the workbook without saving it. But if we do that, our changes will not be saved. If you want to undo the deleted sheet while keeping the changes you made, you can do so by copying the workbook. Let’s see how we can do that.
Step 1:
- First, we will click on the File.
- Next, we will click on the Save As command.
- Then, we will save the existing workbook with another name.
- Finally, we will click on OK.
- Now, we will click on the Close button to close the existing workbook.
Step 2:
- We will now open the new workbook that we have saved with a new name.
- We will see that all the changes are saved in the worksheet. However, the workbook does not have the deleted worksheet.
- We will now open the old workbook.
- We will see that the changes we have made after the deletion are not saved, but the workbook has the deleted worksheet in it.
Step 3:
- We will now move the worksheet that was accidentally deleted from the old workbook to the new workbook.
- To do that, we will right-click on the name of the sheet from the sheet tab. A menu will appear. We will click on the Move or Copy from that menu.
- We will now select the name of the new workbook from the To book drop-down.
- Then, we will select the move to end option from the Before sheet
- Next, we will check the option Create a copy.
- Finally, we will click on OK.
- Now, the accidentally deleted worksheet will move to the new worksheet, while the changes we have made will also be saved.
2. Using Excel AutoSave Feature to Undo Delete Sheet
We might accidentally close a workbook without saving the changes or there was a technical glitch that forced Excel to close abruptly without letting you save the change or the new worksheets you added in that workbook. In such a case, you can recover the workbook using the AutoSave feature of Excel. We have to follow the steps below.
Step 1:
- First, you have to open the abruptly closed Excel workbook. Upon reopening the file, you will see a pan titled Document Recovery on the left side of the workbook. It will tell us that it has recovered the file that was closed unexpectedly.
Step 2:
- We will click on the drop-down below and select Save As from the menu to save the recovered file.
- Alternatively, we can also save the file using the Manage Workbook. First, we will click on the File tab.
- Then, we will click on the Info.
- Now, we will see the workbook we have accidentally closed under the Manage Workbook. We will click on it.
- We will now see the workbook we are trying to recover. We will see a message titled RECOVERED UNSAVED FILE that says, This is a recovered file that is temporarily stored on your computer.
- Finally, we will save the recovered file using Save As option.
- We can also right-click on the file name and select Restore previous versions from the menu to restore the file.
3. Storing Deleted Sheet from the Recycle Bin in Excel
Instead of deleting the Excel workbook permanently if we just delete the file temporarily, we can recover the file from the Recycle Bin. We have to do the following.
Steps:
- We will go to the Recycle Bin and find out the deleted Excel workbook.
- We will then right-click on the name of the workbook. A menu will appear. We will click on the Restore option to restore the file.
Quick Notes
🎯 Always back up your important Excel workbook on another drive of your computer or a cloud file backup system like Google Drive or OneDrive. If you accidentally delete a workbook or worksheet, you can always recover it using the backup.
🎯 If you permanently delete a file, you can recover it using trusted and reliable data recovery software.
Download Practice Workbook
Download this practice book to exercise the task while you are reading this article.
Conclusion
In this article, we have learned how to undo deleted sheet in Excel. I hope from now on, you can undo delete sheet in Excel very easily. However, if you have any queries or recommendations about this article, please leave a comment below. Have a great day!!
