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
    2019-08-29T02:42:28+00:00

    You say "Saving to network, DropBox or other cloud services may not cause AutoRecover to save a backup file."  Why in the world should this be the case?  As far as Excel is concerned, whether the "local" file is on my laptop or in Dropbox should not be the issue.  In fact, it would be best if Microsoft never knew where my file really resides. I should be allowed to choose any directory.

    That said, I completely agree with the many comments in this thread that it is unacceptable and anticompetitive for Microsoft to prohibit AutoSave to any location other than OneDrive.  I should be able to save (and AutoSave) to any location I want to and it should not be Microsoft's business to care or know where I choose to store and save my files.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-08-12T16:05:50+00:00

    Thank you for saying something LK Hill.  I have been irate at losing excel data that I had been working on for hours.  I started a new job (using Win10 for the first time) and I work in accounting so all I do is use Excel. For Microsoft to take away a HUGE function that we have been able to rely on is just STUPID.  FLAT OUT DUMB.  I saved my spreadsheet to my desktop and didn't realize that the auto save was off because I've never dealt with that option before.  I lost a week's worth of work.  Then I tried to turn it on and thought it was.  Lost another batch of work.  It happened for the third time today.  I have not got any work done today because I have been spending the majority of my time reading everyone's forums and complaints about this crappy function.  I tried to find if people created work arounds but it doesn't look like anyone has cheated the system yet.  I will continue to look because there are a lot of intelligent people out there, who know this is a necessity.

    Microsoft,

    Do not talk to me or anyone else about auto-recover when we are clearly **** about the fact that we can only autosave to OneDrive.  Every forum and every complaint that I have seen, replied have switched the subject to auto-recover but DO NOT address what the true complaint is!  Stop deflecting!  Autosave should be a function NOT attached to OneDrive. Period. (I also have NEVER found a document recovered via the paths listed in previous replies.  There must be a 5 min time limit)

    Even if OneDrive worked (Which it does not and has not let me login - another problem...shocker.) I CAN NOT USE ONEDRIVE because I have sensitive work documents that I will not save on a cloud no matter how secure you say it is.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-07-02T22:59:39+00:00

    The #1 question in the forums is "How do I recover unsaved work?'

    The answer is to train yourself to manually save your work periodically, or write a macro or add-in to handle this task automatically for you.

    Simply put in the 90’s i regularly saved periodically, then progress happened and microsoft developed auto save. Praise be...... move on to present day and microsoft has removed this functionality unless i save to the microsoft cloud..... my microsoft licensed laptop is no longer adequate according to microsoft as a safe respository..... so i reiterate this crude attempt to drive revenue by ms is non competitive and restrictive

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-06-26T18:48:12+00:00

    Bob - AutoSave was around LONG before OneDrive. Microsoft just rendered it inoperative in Office 2016/365 for non-OneDrive subscribers...

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-05-17T08:02:21+00:00

    Your assertion that autosave is supported by microsoft is simply incorrect. All of the office programs behave in the same way. Autosave only works if the file location is onedrive or sharepoint as confirmed in the program and on ms website.

    the autosave function no longer works when saving to a local destination or in our case our azure servers.

    you can check the manual settings all you like , i have mine configured to 5 minute intervals but nothing happens.

    so tell me in plain english how that function is supported???

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