In recent months, information technology professionals have been hit with complaints about lost data. Many of these issues can be traced to a new “feature” introduced by Microsoft in its flagship software application suite, Office. There is no good technical workaround to this feature, known as “AutoSave.” Instead, dealing with it requires a fundamental change in the way many people work.
AutoSave was introduced into Office 2016, the most recent version of the suite. The most widely used applications in Office, namely Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all have this feature. AutoSave automatically saves changes to your documents (or spreadsheets or presentations) every few seconds. AutoSave works for files stored on OneDrive or Office 365 (SharePoint Online).
Seems like a good thing, right? Maybe, especially if you’ve never really used Office before or are used to using competing products from Google such as Docs, Sheets or Slides. But for many who’ve been using Office for years, this change causes great consternation.
This is because many if not most folks use old files as a template for a new file. The old file is opened, changes are made and the file is saved under a new file name.
But AutoSave does not support this tried and true practice. AutoSave overwrites the original file as changes are made. This is unexpected for veteran users of the product. The end result is that the old file is lost. Sure, there is a way to get back to the old version, but this is cumbersome at best. This is especially problematic when a historical record of old files is needed, such as for financial statements, invoices or customer proposals, just to name a few.
AutoSave also causes problems for folks who like to search for files by using the “last modified” date. If you open a file, for example, and accidentally hit a key and then delete that inadvertent character, boom, AutoSave kicks in and all of a sudden your file has a new update date. So if you knew you had written a letter back in October 2016, finding it by that date is now impossible.
AutoSave is enabled by default and cannot easily be totally disabled. Instead, the user must turn AutoSave off on a file-by-file basis. As a result, everyone who worked the “old way” must change their method. Instead of opening a file and relying on “Save As,” the file must be copied first, then the copy needs to be opened. This might seem trivial, but because AutoSave was introduced with little fanfare, it has caught many by surprise.
The lesson to learn here is that user requirements should always drive software development, not the other way around. Sure, Microsoft has truly done great stuff over the years, but a hiccup like this is truly a head scratcher.
John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. He can be reached at jagsalud@live.com.
