set new "autosave" toggle to off by default

I totally second this reply. Awesome wording.

If I may add one bit, the most totally broken "feature" is the idea ofclearing the undo buffer.

Autosave might be bearable, if not for that - it totally skewers the single best idea that anyone ever brought to office automation, e.g. the ability to undo previous mistakes.

With Autosave on, either I realize I made a mistake within the time that Microsoft arbitrarily set, or I'm done. This is just so stupid.

Maybe their developers will also like a Code Management System that arbitrarily commits their changes every once in a while, as they go along building the code or revising it. Hey, wouldn't that be great.

I totally agree with your addendum. I wonder if their Code Management System is both the origin for this collaborative working idea and the reason for these issues with its implementation.

Clearing the undo buffer every AutoSave may be considered necessary for the MS Office collaborative working mechanism to work, but it really just reflects a failure to implement a collaborative Undo feature instead. 

My writing technique is not very concise - I tend to write my ideas down and then go back to revise the structure and content. With Undo I can go back beyond the error (e.g. deleted/moved the wrong paragraph), copy the original text (or cell, slide, etc.), redo the other editing and then paste the original text back in the document. Without it, I have to rewrite the text from scratch.

The current approach means that every AutoSave version of my document will contain uncorrected editing errors. I'm unlikely to be able to identify which previous version holds the latest pre-error contents or find all the errors in the previously saved versions.

I can understand that Undo is problematic in that 0.01% of cases of people editing the same document at the same time.

It's totally a lossage in every other case.

And this feature which is supposed to save time, causes more loss of time than any other that has been pushed on end users. And when you do use the history to find the file you are looking for, when I go to save it and replace a file that causes the program to fail and restart which then losses the file I actually need. Auto save is not at all helpful.

There needs to be a global setting to turn it off.

Hi Jonathan,

The AutoSave is a new feature available for Office 365 subscribers wherein changes made on the file are saved in every few seconds. Regarding your concern, we cannot turn off the AutoSave feature by default in Excel 2016. However, we can turn this off to a file and Excel 2016 will keep it every time you reopen that file. To know more about the AutoSave feature and the FAQ's about it, feel free to check this link.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

do you offer legacy downloads of older versions of excel that do not have this ruinous feature? this is not something that works for me and will likely cause me to cancel my subscription. can you send this to the product team so that they can offer an option to turn off autosave toggles entirely?

There needs to be a global setting to turn it off.

Are you saying that the option I showed isn't available? Or that it's available, but it doesn't work? This one:

OK, that's in Word, but it should be there in Excel for Office 365 as well.