Autosave

Have you ever happened to lose data due to power failure or accidental voltage drop? I believe that this happened to all of us at least once. The only way to overcome data loss is to create a habit of periodically saving the document on which you work. But as far as you are dilligent, sometimes it can happen that this is not enough and you will be left without the fruits of your work. The solution is automatic document saving!

The autosave option is basically turned on, you only need to adjust it further and to activate it. Clicking on the File tab goes into the Background View, where by clicking Options, you open the dialog box with the options for setting Excel. If you click on Save in the menu on the left side of the dialog window, the options for setting document capture will appear. Here we can see a number of features that offer: file type selection, location selection where files are being saved, source of backup locations, backup options … The most important thing is to set how often Excel performs automatic recording. The base value assumes that automatic saving is done every 10 minutes, and if you want to be absolutely sure not to lose your work you can reduce the frequency to every 5 minutes or every minute. The more often you save a document, you will be safer. However, every time you perform this operation on an Excel document, it will slow down at a moment; be free to estimate how much it disturbs you at work!

If you happen to turn off the computer due to a voltage drop or simply leave out forgetting to save a document, the solution is very simple. Restart Excel, open the file you were working with and enter Background View. By choosing the Info option, you will enter the menu where you can see the Manage Versions option. To the right of it you will see a message with a shortcut to the last version of this document (which you for some reason did not save). By clicking on a shortcut, you will open a backup that was created as a result of autosave. The more frequent the saving frequency, the „fresher“ data will be in the last recorded copy. You just need to append the document with missing data and save it.

Sometimes it will happen that you are not sure what the file you forgot to save is called. The solution to this problem is to enter the Background View, select the Info option, and open the menu for resetting old versions by clicking Manage Versions. Two options will appear: clicking on the first one opens a folder with all the previously recorded file versions (clicking on one of them will see what Excel has recorded and whether it is the one we are looking for), and by clicking on the other we will delete all the previously recorded versions in order to free disk space.

Although Autosave is a very useful option, make sure you do not need it!