Autosave again

A little more than four months ago, I was worrying about the then relatively new feature from Microsoft called Autosave. See reference 1.

Not much progress, in that I have not bothered to take a couple of hours out to take the tutorials and in that I am still worrying.

For my larger Excel workbooks and Powerpoints, I still tend to turn the feature off. This had unfortunate results just once, when I made the mistake of walking away from the computer without having saved about an hour's work on an Excel workbook. While I was away, the battery ran down and Windows went into some kind of hibernation mode which involved closing things like Excel without saving any work in progress. Yes, I had forgotten about the battery, but I had thought that Windows got going before the power went completely and went down a bit more gracefully.

Then this morning I wonder about how cunning the feature is. If one is working on a large workbook, can Microsoft do a save while one carries on working? With manual save the answer is no; one has to wait until the save is completed before carrying on. Or does Microsoft log key strokes and apply them to the last saved copy to create a new saved copy in the background? A version of the roll-forwards and roll-backwards known to database administrators? It seems a bit far fetched here. And what about running code which makes lots of changes to the workbook? Does autosave kick in as soon as the code stops? Or does Microsoft interrupt execution from time to time to take a copy of the work in progress? A throw back to the time when dumps used to get written to output tapes, a time when most processing was tape-to-tape and the the mean time between computer failures was less than the time required to process an entire tape. Someone had written some cunning code which enabled one to restart a run from such a dump, and so avoid having to keep going back to the beginning of the tapes.

And why has the feature not appeared in Word? Why are things different in the world of Word? After all, some people have very big Word documents, documents in which they have invested large amounts of time and money, just as some people have very big Excel documents.

Is this the sort of stuff you learn about if you enroll yourself on one of those courses to turn you into a Chartered Microsoft Engineer? To allow you to add the coveted initials 'CME' to your name in print?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/auto-save.html.