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2.7. Excel Autosave - Office 365

Applies to: @RISK 7.x and newer

In Office 365 when an Excel spreadsheet is saved to Microsoft OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online, the AutoSave feature is automatically enabled. AutoSave is a feature that saves work every few seconds, or when the file changes; it was introduced as a method of preventing data loss and enhancing recovery after an event.

The AutoSave feature can cause significant issues with @RISK, especially when running simulations. A simulation makes many changes to the spreadsheet rapidly, and can trigger AutoSave too frequently, causing excessive execution times for simulations. Also, with the AutoSave feature enabled, users can be prompted to save @RISK results every time an AutoSave operation was triggered. Both of these issues have been addressed in @RISK 8.0.

There are, however, still some drawbacks to using the AutoSave feature with an @RISK workbook. The most significant is that each time an AutoSave occurs, Excel’s “undo stack” is cleared, resulting in the inability to use “Undo” to step backwards through changes. It is likely this will not be addressed before the final release of version 8.0, but a future version of @RISK will address this flaw.

Disabling AutoSave in Office 365

To turn off AutoSave for a single file, toggle the AutoSave option in the upper left corner of the Excel window

If you turn AutoSave Off for an individual file the program will remember to keep it off every time you reopen that file. If you switch it back On for an individual file, it will remember to keep in on for that file.

If you want to turn AutoSave off, by default, for all files, go to File > Options> Save and uncheck the box next to AutoSave OneDrive and SharePoint Online files by default on [Excel].

Restart [Excel] (or whichever application you're in) and the change will take effect.

Notes:

If you want AutoSave off by default for all your Office applications, such as PowerPoint and [Word] too, you'll need to repeat these steps for each of those programs.
If you want individual files to still be AutoSaved you can open those files and manually turn AutoSave back on for those files.

Last Update: 2020-04-27

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