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
    2020-03-04T14:27:14+00:00

    Remember when Autosave was the office product essentially pressing ctrl+s for you every x minutes? Pepperidge farm remembers.

    I'm not sure why this simple thing needs to be made cloud exclusive. There's nothing else needed here, just save the geezless document every x minutes.

    AutoRecover or whatever the hell is completely useless. I lost documents countless times and never managed to recover, due the AutoRecover file being a garbled pile of bits that even office itself couldn't ingest.

    And no, I will not save my document from the company google drive to onedrive just to have bloody AutoSave, and then write it back to the company google drive when finished. This is ridiculous.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-10-10T16:14:11+00:00

    Sigh! I have just wasted another half hour reading this thread to see if I can recover a very large powerpoint file I was working on when my PC rebooted to finish installing updates. I am not technically savvy, just a regular user of Office. I try to avoid using one drive for reasons that are mine. I should have saved before allowing the reboot but I didn't; I was thinking I could carry on where I left off after reboot. I had autosave on set at 10 minutes.

    This has been a 9 month conversation in this thread so I'm not expecting to find my file in anyone's answer.

    I just wanted to express my deep frustration with MS that my unsaved version of file was not in the recovery pane or anywhere else I have looked. Even tried the professional recovery software and still couldn't recover it.

    I can see I need to get back in the habit of regularly hitting the save button. A huge step backwards.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-09-23T17:07:21+00:00

    Jim:

    I make take this thread down due to the misunderstandings around "Auto-save" vs "Auto-recover."

    Yes, Auto-save is an apparently new function that is Microsoft-cloud dependent. But given the dicey reliability of Auto-Recover (IMHO) there really should be an option to Auto-save to a cloud platform other than Microsoft's proprietary OneDrive.

    And it's not really "the cloud" that is initiating the Auto-save, is it? It's the Office app. Would it REALLY be difficult for Microsoft to allow users to point a periodic Auto-save at a different cloud platform? Or the user's PC/Mac, for that matter?

    All we want is a snapshot so if lightning strikes nearby and the power goes out, we don't lose an hour or half-day's work. Yes, that's supposed to be the Auto-Recover facility's responsibility, but it does not always work.

    Microsoft just wants to promote OneDrive, however manipulative it may be. It's that simple.

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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. Anonymous
    2019-06-29T17:18:26+00:00

    Jim:

    Per my earlier posting, I do realize now that it was AutoRecover that I was thinking about, with its periodic "Save" option in Preferences.

    If I could depend on AutoRecover to work properly each time I need it, all would be fine. But it doesn't, and thus calls into question the AutoSave feature, which Microsoft has made exclusive to OneDrive. And 90% of the market does NOT want to use OneDrive just because of such a manipulative move by Microsoft. 

    This whole thread was initiated after I lost a half day's work in a current version of Excel when my system lost power and crashed. AutoRecover did not save ANY of my work, and I knew where to look for the files. It just recovered to the version I had opened four hours beforehand. 

    Several years now have passed and Microsoft has still not worked out the bugs in Office 365. My Excel cursor still behaves erratically when Excel has been open for a few days, and Excel tends to freeze or crash when I have several large spreadsheets open. There's no excuse for that. And freakin' AutoRecover is not reliable enough - just ask around. 

    You'd think that a company with a near-monopoly world-wide on office applications and billions in annual profit could do better. But no...

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