If you hit "Don't Save" on an Excel file on your Mac, the autosave recovery system that Windows users rely on may as well not exist. That is the blunt truth behind the story posted by Bitter_Artichoke_939, and it is a frustration we hear far too often. The user followed every generic search result, looked for the "Containers" folder, checked their settings, and found nothing. The folder simply was not there. This is not a case of user error. It is a case of a tool that promises safety but delivers a maze.
What this means in practical terms is that Excel for Mac treats autosave as an afterthought, and the recovery process is neither intuitive nor consistently documented. The user's experience is not unusual: the "Containers" folder path that works for some macOS versions simply does not exist on others, especially after system updates or when using newer Mac hardware. Even when the folder does appear, the autosave files are often hidden deep inside a labyrinth of nested directories with obscure names like "com.microsoft.Excel" followed by a string of numbers and letters. If you do not know exactly where to look and what to look for, you are out of luck.
We think this is a failure of design, not a failure of the user. A tool that stores your work automatically should also let you retrieve it without a scavenger hunt. The fact that a Reddit thread is the most reliable source of recovery instructions, rather than any official Microsoft documentation or an in-app prompt, tells you everything about how poorly this feature is implemented. The user should not have to resort to third-party forum advice to find their own data. The autosave location should be visible, configurable, and recoverable from within the application itself.
Here is the concrete point: if you work on a Mac and depend on Excel, do not assume autosave will save you. Manually save your files early and often. Use version history in cloud services like OneDrive or Google Drive as your primary safety net. And if you do lose a file, try searching for files with the extension ".tmp" or ".xlsb" in your user library folder, specifically ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/. But know that even that path may fail you. The only reliable fix is a tool that treats recovery as a feature, not a hidden emergency exit.