Autosave not working - no files are there

Bottom line, we cannot rely on any MS autosave feature. They just don't work reliably.  What is even worse, is that I am now seeing more than one person reporting that manual saving apparently does not work too.  They did not reply on autosave, they used "real" saves during a long editing session, only to find the next day that they lost the whole day's work. Apparently you have to do a SAVE AS to a separate file name ... <sigh>

I must say, as with many of the applications I use from microsoft, issues exist, the autosave problem being one of them

Autosave?? what autosave???

I find it unbelievable that a company of Microsoft size cannot produce a simple "autosave" function that works....I have spent may hours trawling other computers to help employees to recover work that they wrongly thought was being "Autosaved".

Microsoft...hang your head in shame.

I've had the exact same issue with some college work: I went to sleep at 4am after working on a document for 7 hours straight, only to find that it had reverted itself to a version from the day before with zero evidence that i had as much as opened the file.

I found this out half an hour before the work was due in, so as you can imagine I got in a right state.

I have noticed, that if you don't have a trailing slash () for the AutoRecover file location, Excel 2013 will not create any AutoRecovery files.  

File Tab -> Options -> Save -> with 'Save AutoRecover Information every' X minutes turned, on, the value in 'AutoRecover file location' must be valid with a trailing slash. 

E.g. "D:\Data\AutoBackups\Excel" doesn't work and the dialog doesn't complain when you click OK. No files are ever written there. 

Change it to "D:\Data\AutoBackups\Excel" and Excel starts to create files there 10 minutes after open a file (provided you change something). 

I'm beginning to think that Microsoft has changed the behavior of Word and Excel since I first posted on Oct. 27. Either that, or I was seriously mistaken about what they were doing.

For example, I noticed that Word now forces a slash () at the end of the "AutoRecover file location." If I remove the slash and click "OK," then open the options again, the slash is back. (Excel does not do this--if you remove the slash, it stays gone.)

I am also finding autosave documents in the "AutoRecover file location" in both Word and Excel. I can change the location option in both apps, and the autosave documents now appear there. If the app crashes (or is terminated), the autosave document remains there and is displayed as a recovery option when the app is next opened.

Meanwhile, Word and Excel are now putting copies of the autosave documents in the "UnsavedFiles" folder if I close normally without saving them. They weren't doing that before, so they are now behaving more reasonably. (This is the %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles
folder, and there does not appear to be an option to change it.)

Back to Excel, it seems to be working correctly now even without the slash, though I think you're right that it was not working until recently. Thanks for the note.

I thought it might be useful to say what version I'm using: Word is 15.0.4971.1002 and Excel is 15.0.4971.1000. The MSO version for both is 15.0.4971.1000.

I have noticed, that if you don't have a trailing slash () for the AutoRecover file location, Excel 2013 will not create any AutoRecovery files.  

File Tab -> Options -> Save -> with 'Save AutoRecover Information every' X minutes turned, on, the value in 'AutoRecover file location' must be valid with a trailing slash. 

E.g. "D:\Data\AutoBackups\Excel" doesn't work and the dialog doesn't complain when you click OK. No files are ever written there. 

Change it to "D:\Data\AutoBackups\Excel" and Excel starts to create files there 10 minutes after open a file (provided you change something).