Soon Autosave Will Be Enabled By Default in Office Desktop Applications
Autosave is a really great idea in theory, but not always in practice. It’s been available in Microsoft Office for quote a while now, but it wasn’t on by default. That’s changing very soon.
AutoSave will be enabled by default in the upcoming semi-annual release of Office. This change means that for documents stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, your users will not have to worry about losing their changes. Changes will be stored in the cloud automatically, and users will no longer have to explicitly press Ctrl + S or the Save button.
See: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?featureid=33017
If you’re a Tenant Admin of some sort, then you’ve probably received a message letting you know autosave is coming. This is a VERY important change to let your users know about.
Autosave is great if you are working in one document and you don’t want to lose any changes. The actual logic is a bit confusing, but the basic idea is that when you stop typing for a period of time – a short period of time – your changes are saved to the cloud, either directly or via OneDrive sync. That’s great! No more clicking that little brown square (it’s a 3.5″ diskette!). You won’t lose anything if your machine dies.
That’s all well and good, but many of us have a work style that means this may cause us real problems. Do you ever do this?
First, go find a file that’s like the one you want to create. Open it up in Word or Excel or whatever, and start typing. When you get to a good save point, do a Save As and give it a new name.
Sound familiar?
Well, with autosave enabled, you’re going to have a problem. As soon as you open that old document up and start typing, you’re going to be overwriting the old document you consider finished.
When you save with a new name, that new document is going to be exactly what you want. But the old document? Well, it’s no longer what it was – it contains all of the edits you just made.
The immediate reaction I’ve heard from many people is to simply turn off autosave. It’s not that hard to do. In Word, simply go into File / Options / Save and uncheck the box.
But if you turn off autosave altogether, you won’t get the benefits!
I think it’s better if we can change our habits instead. What I’m trying to do now is go find the file I want to start with, copy it to a new file (I like copy / paste in Windows Explorer) and then get to work. Yes, I forget some times, but I’m getting better at it.
This is one of those improvements that will undoubtedly trip you up at least once. But don’t throw the autosave out with the bath water. It’s a great idea, as long as you can adapt your work style to let it help you.
I recently ran into a major issue with the auto save default changing from “no” to “yes”. I had a workflow that automatically ran on a document and it would look at a property “approved” every time the file was changed.
If the document was approved, the workflow would change the permissions to read only on the document.
This workflow was in place and working beautifully for over a year.
One day I started getting problem reports. People said that files were being locked. After many hours of investigation, I figured out the issue. The files were now being “auto saved” every minute. During crunch times man people were working on many documents and the workflow would fire off every minute on each document that was being edited.
The workflow engine couldn’t keep up and the workflows started to be staggered and delayed. As long as there were pending workflows, people could not modify the file or it’s properties, because the files were “locked” by the workflows.
I had to disable the workflow. A new workflow runs periodically and checks whether any files need to have its permissions changed.
god point marcel. i also,wonder how this will work with versioning. will,a,new,major,version but created on each save? maybe that’s why the set the default number of versions to 500 on all libraries.
Thank you Marc for this info. I have the same concern about versions automatically saved, even with this functionality in O365; it’s difficult to go back to a prior version when you don’t have control over what it’s saving as a new version (I.e. what the difference is between versions). I was advising end users to edit in the application if they wanted to save specific changes as new versions, so now I will need to change my advice a bit.