How many times have you lost significant amounts of work because an application crashed? It is a common scenario for students to lose their work and causes huge frustration.
With Auto-Save in Office 365 this is a thing of the past. If you are working on a Word, PowerPoint or Excel document, with Auto-Save on any changes are saved automatically. Brilliant! No more lost work! Hooray!
BUT... you should be aware of a few things (from Microsoft)
With Auto-Save in Office 365 this is a thing of the past. If you are working on a Word, PowerPoint or Excel document, with Auto-Save on any changes are saved automatically. Brilliant! No more lost work! Hooray!
- Starting from an existing file, making edits and then doing a Save a Copy to a new file - Anyone who starts from a previous file (for example last quarter's earnings report), edits, and then does a Save a Copy to start this quarter's earnings report will cause the changes to be saved in both files if AutoSave is on. We recommend that everyone do the Save a Copy before making any changes and have even added a reminder in the product when this happens. If a user makes accidental changes, they should use the Version History feature to restore the original document.
- Performing "hypothetical" or "what-if" changes to a file - Anyone who opens a file and does some hypothetical analysis (such as forecasting the impact of market changes on the budget) with the desire to close the file without saving will have inadvertently saved all the changes to the file while AutoSave is on. We recommend turning off AutoSave while doing the hypothetical analysis and then turning it back on once the user is ready to save again.
- Dashboards and Viewing Files with Sorts/Filters in Excel - Anyone who sorts or filters a dashboard while AutoSave is on will affect the view of everyone else in the file. If a file is meant to be a dashboard or used by multiple people with sorts and filters, we recommend setting the Read-Only Recommended property on that file using File > Info > Protect Workbook > Always Open Read-Only, so viewers of the dashboard won't save their changes unless they explicitly choose to edit the file.
- Finalised or Published Files - Anyone who accidentally edits a finalised, published file with AutoSave on will save their changes to the file. Once a file has been finalised, we recommend setting the Read-Only Recommended property or Mark as Final property on the file, so accidental edits from viewers and readers of the file won't be saved.
As stated above, if you do want to go back to a previous state of the document - no problem, you can use the version history which you can find at the top right of the document
Or in the Info menu:
Details: