Why does AutoSave in Office 365 only work on Microsoft OneDrive?!?

Anonymous
2019-02-03T21:53:24+00:00

Recently I lost power in my home after working on a spreadsheet for over three hours. Even though Auto-save was turned on in preferences, I lost ALL the work-- Auto-recover did not capture any of the changes, either. I had to spend the rest of the day re-creating my changes.

Needless to say, I was pretty pissed off, and went to research how Microsoft had managed to lose all my data. I first went to confirm that AutoSave was turned on, and found "Turn on AutoSave by default" checked on the Preferences/Save panel. However, in the document title bar, AutoSave displayed as "OFF" and was grayed out to the point of imperceptibility. This is true not just of Excel, but Word and Powerpoint as well.

I licensed Office 365 from GoDaddy, so I called their tech support line, and they gave me the incredible story that AUTOSAVE ONLY WORKS WHEN YOU STORE YOUR DOCUMENTS ON MICROSOFT ONEDRIVE - not natively on the Mac or on DropBox, which I've used for years.

****, are you kidding me? According to the "Datanyze.com" website, OneDrive has less than 9% of the "File Sharing" market, well behind DropBox, Box, and GoogleDrive. Even assuming that all Google users are backed up to Google's servers, 2/3 of users out there aren't able to automatically back up their changes because they don't use OneDrive.

Even worse, most have probably been head-faked by Microsoft into thinking that they're safe because AutoSave displays as automatically turned on in Preferences. They don't notice the obscure label in the title bar and don't find out it's actually not turned on until they're hit with a disaster like I was, and then wonder **** happened. 

This policy is patently irresponsible, and anti-competitive to boot.  In order to have AutoSave, you not only have to store your documents on OneDrive, you have to start them up from OneDrive - not your Mac hard drive folder icon - or AutoSave is still turned off.

Now, I'm back to the pre-cloud days of having to constantly remember to save documents as I make important changes to them. Seriously?!?

And don't suggest that AutoRecover will keep me covered in the absence of AutoSave: I've lost countless hours of work when AutoRecover does not do its job. Its reliability on the Mac has always been spotty.

This is crazy. Is Microsoft really willing to callously risk the data integrity of the majority of its users just to coerce them to switch to OneDrive?!?

IMHO, what Microsoft needs to do is:

  1. Display clearly in Preferences/Save that AutoSave is NOT turned on (and change the misleading "automatically as default" wording),
  2. State the reason (i.e. OneDrive required) so that users like me don't waste hours trying to determine whether it's just one more Office 365 bug,
  3. Add a local backup feature to Office 365 to automatically save to a hard-drive or competitive file sharing service (it can't be that hard),
  4. Stop being evil by claiming that not enough people have complained about the missing feature to justify its renewed availability.

Really, Microsoft should be ashamed of having pulled a stunt like this. It's an irresponsible, blatantly anti-competitive move, straight out of the naughty 80s.

[NOTE - this post has been updated to reflect the fact that AutoSave was a more recent development by Microsoft, not a long-standing feature.]

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-03-17T10:00:37+00:00

    This situation is frankly appalling.

    Word just crashed on my Mac when I was pretty much finishing up a document. Pretty much two hours of work down the drain.

    Why wasn't I protected? Because I chose to save the file locally.

    Microsoft is forcing users to store documents in clouds in order to be sensibly protected from such anomalies in the work of its software.

    According to laws of the Macau SAR jurisdiction, documents which contain sensitive data may not be stored outside any Macau-based server, without a previous authorisation from the Personal Data Protection Office.

    In order to comply with these laws, I am not able to expect that my actual work is respected by Microsoft, unless I keep saving my documents. Please tell me whether this is sensible.

    It is blatant that this is a move forcing users to resort to the Microsoft cloud services. I am so mad at the work that I have lost that I shall seriously consider bringing this issue before the competent authorities.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-01-16T03:17:04+00:00

    Not only they don't allow auto-save without OneDrive, but they also do not allow placing the OneDrive folder inside G: Google Drive File Stream, which would be the optimal solution for people or organisations that require using MS Office with autosave and who use Google Drive as their cloud file storage of choice.

    MS has a fantastic Office, but they're not Google when it comes to cloud file storage and sharing. I would (and many others too for sure) respect MS much more if they even had a "auto-save" to Google Drive.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-05-17T15:01:30+00:00

    re: Stuart's comment "...make your own backup on your own terms. You can use VBA, AppleScript or JavaScrhipt (sic)..." you DO realize that this approach leaves out 99% of the known world, correct? 

    Only about 9% of the market uses OneDrive, and I'd be surprised if an additional 1% knew enough about coding to set up their own automatic backup system. So this leaves at most 10% of the world with auto-save capability for Office 365.

    The fact remains that Microsoft has made a typically selfish and anti-competitive move to remove a long-standing local auto-save feature in favor of its own proprietary cloud.

    And by the way, auto-recover is a notoriously fickle utility. It works perhaps 50% of the time in my experience, so I'm back to occasionally losing at least one significant set of changes to an Office 365 document - just like in 1995. Way to move the world forward, Mr. Softie!

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-05-17T06:33:42+00:00

    To try and argue that this move was anything other than a strong-arm and arguably anti-competitive tactic, by Microsoft, to try and drive sales to it's cloud platforms is disingenuous. There are some merits to your points about the competing cloud services, when compared to autosaving to Microsoft's cloud services. However, saving, including autosaving, to the local OS has always been supported by all Office products since their inception and should be considered, as we all thought it would be, a fundamental function of the product.

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-05-02T18:09:40+00:00

    I have been frustrated by the same thing. I use iCloud for storage and have in the last year lost several documents because autosave was not working. Even my IT staff at work could not figure out why it was not working. This is shameful of Microsoft and clearly a self-interested attempt to gain more subscription revenue for OneDrive. Shame on Microsoft.

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