You could also check out this Python script that does some of this parsing automatically, but your mileage may vary. With some elbow grease, you can pull all the recent files out of this document. )īottom Line: Copy the file to a safe location. You can also repair the MS Word files with the following steps.

Everyone knows how to open Microsoft Word on Mac, but we do not talk about just opening and closing the files. Each document compromises one numbered item under this plist key.Īs you can see, unfortunately the values for these keys are binary encoded, not plain text, so you need to paste the Value strings into a Hex editor to see the file names and paths. Locate the file which saved as Normal and moves it to the desktop. The example above is for Word, which corresponds to the MSWD code. The list of recent items for each application is stored in the key File MRU. If you open it up it will look something like this:

This file is in standard plist format, and can be viewed using the plist viewer built into Xcode. The recent documents for all Microsoft office products are stored in a preferences file (plist) in each users's library:

Undo a save in word for mac 2011