How to undelete (recover) accidentally deleted stacks

Question

I had created a personal stack with Excel documents, and have accidentally moved the stack icon (that was on the dock, next to the default stacks) such that it hovered on the desktop. The standard "vanishing cloud"  appeared, and gone was my stack along with all my documents! No trace of it could be found in the trashcan.  I can't even find my stack name in the time machine. It seems it never existed.
How can I recover my Excel documents, or even better find back my stack, and reinstate it?

Answer 1

All the icons on the Dock are actually aliases. They can be set to display as a Stack or a Folder by right-clicking (or Control-clicking) on them and changing the settings in the popup menu that appears; other settings for each Dock item are accessible the same way.
When an item is removed from the Dock, typically by dragging it off and watching it disappear in a poof, only the alias used on the Dock is removed; the original item remains where it had been on the hard drive.
The original folder that you used to create the 'stack' item in the Dock should still exist. You can locate it by searching for it by name, or by searching for one of the files that was in it - they still exist, too, in that original folder.
If you search for the file by name, once it is 'found' you can do a Get Info on it to find the path to where it is located, specifically to the location of the folder containing that file.
Once you locate that folder, you can add it back to the Dock very easily - drag it to the area between the dashed line and the Trash, wait for the icons already there to move aside, then drop it onto the Dock. You can then adjust its display and behavior settings, if needed.