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. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2019-08-29T17:26:10+00:00

    The feature that lets you save versions of files on a "cloud" or server is done by the server. Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint offer this service. Other companies providing cloud storage can choose to offer versioning or not offer it.

    DropBox works with Microsoft to support various cloud services. Currently, co-authoring is supported. However, DropBox does not appear to offer versioning at this time.

    Microsoft Office 365 Integration - Dropbox

    I checked the official Microsoft feature suggestion database and there is not currently a request for Version support with DropBox. You can add that suggestion here:

    Excel for Mac

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-09-23T00:16:31+00:00

    Forget not wanting to use a cloud system. How about when you don't have *access* to the cloud? Why can't it autosave when you are offline? If it can, because your onedrive actually does save offline as well as on, the whole argument is a lie.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-09-23T00:23:24+00:00

    Your answers ignore the fact that Microsoft used to, until very recently, allow for autosave to whatever directory you designated. If that directory was in the cloud, that was immaterial to what Office products did, which is to save to a directory.

    Conflating auto-save with auto-recover is disingenuous at best. Auto-save saved over your file, again, wherever you opened it. Requiring users to be online to use this feature is ridiculous.

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  5. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2019-09-23T16:34:45+00:00

    It's impossible for AutoSave to work when saving off-line because AutoSave is provided by the server, not your Mac. If you're not connected to the server, the server has no way of knowing about any revisions that were made and therefore can't save a new version.

    I think the confusion relates to the basic question asked at the beginning of this thread,  "Why does AutoSave in Office 365 only work on Microsoft OneDrive?!?"

    The answer is that AutoRecover is a feature that has existed for many years and works with files saved locally. When the idea of saving to "the cloud" which in Microsoft's case is either OneDrive or SharePoint, an entirely new backup method had to be invented. The new method was dubbed AutoSave to denote a new feature that works differently from AutoRecover.

    The similarity in feature names has proven to be problematic. Perhaps Microsoft should rename AutoSave to something like Cloud Version, Cloud Backup, Cloud Recovery or some other moniker that makes it sound different because it is quite different from AutoRecover.

    You're covered if you save locally by AutoRecover. You're covered if you save to OneDrive or SharePoint by AutoSave. If you save to a network file location or some other cloud, then you get whatever that network or cloud service has to offer (sometimes it's no backup, sometimes it's complete backup - Microsoft has no way of knowing).

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