Autosave

eddiej

Hi all,

I'm on a holiday from the gardening/diy board is it true that the autosave feature in office xp will only allow you acess the autosaved file if the programme crashes and not if you say shut down excel and not accept the save option.

Assuming this is true can anyone recommend any good autosave software i could get. This needs to be fool proof as its for my da computer

Cheers

Eddie

Capt'n Midnight

Autosave has been a feature of non-microsoft software for decades.
Wordperfect for Dos being a prime example.

NB Autorecover is not autosave - AFAIK it doesn't create a backup file , just "saves keystrokes" (not technically accurate but you get the idea)

In Word - tools - options - save - always create backup copy
then use crtl-S to save every so often
NB. never use quick save - it can save the doc in order of typing , not as laid out on screen making recovery difficult.

In excel - its a PER DOCUMENT setting
file - save as - general options (or something) - always create backup
you have to do this manually for EVERY FILE


Be careful - many "save now" type apps you can download are really trojans/malware

OpenOffice - tools - options - load/save - general - always create backup
do it once and word/excel/powerpoint docs are sorted.

Microsoft bought in help from VMS designers to build NT - but the left out the VMS feature to add a version number to files. Backups and revision control were done by the OS - back in the 70's , windows still has a VERY long way to go provide that functionality. (also the text editior could replay typing backwards and forwards so if you addidently trashed the format of a document you could simply roll back , no need to check through 32,000 possible previous saves.

Capt'n Midnight

eddiej wrote:

if you say shut down excel and not accept the save option.

true for almost every app and I don't think there will be a cure for this since it's just carrying out your wishes.

F12 is the save as option for excel - Ctrl-S works for most apps
educate the user is the best option - little stickers on the keyboard if you have to.

some excel users hate autosave , because they can't revert back to a previous version (another reason to not use excel for mission critical docs) - simply save as Revision 10 before you mess with it.

Capt'n Midnight

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/assistance/HP012132291033.aspx

I'm more confuesed after reading it - did not mention .xlk at all