Auto save

Microsoft have been twiddling with their save options, twiddles which, as a 365 customer, just turn up. Probably some time after I have deleted the email which would have told me about them.

OneNote abolished save some time ago, with every keystroke onto a note being saved without one every having to do anything. No save or save as. And given that I only use OneNote for fairly ephemeral stuff, the sort of notes which I might have scribbled into my Filofax in the olden days, this works for me. Much more bothered about my lack of understanding of how OneNote organises & synchronises the data than about its saves.

Then, more recently, the little notices about things being uploaded to OneDrive vanished from the bottom of Office screens. Notices which used to come with save actions, and notices which I quite liked. Not yet being entirely confident that OneDrive is doing what I want or expect, I liked to get these notices. Vaguely reassuring.

And now they have implemented Autosave in Excel and Powerpoint. Turned on by default, but there is a turn off option. I have yet to read the small print, but I think the idea is that your changes are being saved continuously, every so many seconds when you are active. But not so continuously that you don't need to click on save before exiting.

Not sure about this one yet. I sometimes get into something of a muddle with one of the Office applications and the best way forward seems to be to revert to some previous copy of the file and start over. A previous copy which will not exist if they are doing autosave. And my quick peek at their versions feature was not reassuring.

Furthermore, Excel now has a habit of saving itself, even when one does not think one has amended one's workbook. In the olden days, if you looked at a workbook for some reason or other and then closed it again, the date-last-amended listed in properties or Windows Explorer was reassuringly unchanged. This is no longer the case.

Perhaps I hanker after an arrangement whereby I can save as I go along, in case of small accidents. But then I have a check document back into a versioned document store when I have finished for the day, with none of the versions ever getting lost. Without having to bother with including a date-stamp in the document name. That is to say, a document manager. That would protect me against big accidents.

Or perhaps I have to sweat through one of those (usually tiresome) online tutorials that Microsoft publish. If only I could find the right one, without having to spend quality time on looking for it.