Microsoft Rolling out long time anticipated autosave function

Today Microsoft finally confirmed of rolling out autosave function for its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users. You can find detailed information about that feature in the official roadmap page of the feature.

Now let's understand what does it means for you!

Freedom from saving

For a long ago both Microsoft Office and Google Office Suite web apps have had an option of saving everything automatically without saving it manually. Now Microsoft brings the same functions to the offline Office apps like Excel, Word or PowerPoint. But there is one requirement: the document you work on should have been placed in SharePoint otherwise this function will not work. Sadly, this not touching non-business OneDrive (OneDrive for Business is simply a SharePoint site), so users using their Microsoft Accounts will not benefit from this function.

But is it good to have everything automatically saved?

Pros and Cons

Well when you are working on regular document its greatest thing Microsoft ever did after creating Office apps. Sometimes you are editing you document and your PC go off. After you bring it on again you are checking what was saved and most of the time you are finding missing things from information you put into that document. Some administrators learned to press Ctrl+S every 10 seconds. But such practices are awful since the cause loss of time. All these facts been counted when Microsoft rolled autosave function to its enterprise users. But is there only a good thing? No!

I am enterprise user and I'm putting all my data into Office documents. Some of them are Excel some others are Word. And time to time I am creating documents that have familiar content with another document. So, what I do? I'm just opening that document, change what I need and save it as a separate document, while it's not changing my original document. I am pretty sure that I'm not the only person who use this logic in working with documents. With this function it could break this logic simply because when you edit your original document it will automatically save the changes to the original file. So, I will have two options to resolve this problem. Or I must save it as a separate file before starting editing either make all changes save on different file and undo all changes made. Both are not comfortable. First one is out of our usual logic and we will forget to do things inverse. Second one is not possible in case of big documents and hug data changes.

So here is the question: if you need this feature be active for you or not? It depends on what kind of documents are you using! If you are duplicating your documents most of the time by making small changes to them then you probably will choose not to have this function activated. If so contact your administrator to turn this off. But if you are editing documents and you need them to be saved every time you made even a little change then you just need to wait a few days before it will reach you!

The other problem that this change could cause is accidental changes and data loses. How this could happen? Well, imagine a situation when you open someone’s file and discuss it and to highlight some points you made edits on it. Now this will cause a data to lose. Or you might want to just read it and accidentally changed something. To prevent this cases document owner can set the document to always be opened in Read-Only Recommended mode (File > Info > Protect Document/ Workbook/ Presentation > Always Open in Read-Only) so no one will made accidental changes.

Also, a user can turn AutoSave off for a file while it is open by clicking the AutoSave toggle. This disables AutoSave for the current document for that user. The next time the same user opens the document, AutoSave will be off. If they open a different document, AutoSave will not be affected by their choice in the other document.

Finally, you can ask your administrator to manage this function in your behalf.

For users

Don't have administrator who help you manage your tenant? Just contact us and we will be happy to support and serve you to make the most from your subscription! Just contact us on [email protected]!

For Admins

If you use Group Policy in your organization, you can use a policy setting to turn off AutoSave by default. There are separate policy settings for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. For example, the policy setting for Word is named "Turn off AutoSave by default in Word" and can be found under the "Microsoft Office 2016\AutoSave" Policy Path. To use these policy settings, make sure you've downloaded the latest Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) from the Microsoft Download Center. Please note that the Don’t AutoSave files Group Policies will be removed in a future release and will no longer be supported. Please use the above Turn off AutoSave by default policy settings instead.