Forum Discussion
AutoSave feature causing frustration
HI Marli van Staden.
First of all, before editing the registry be EXTREMELY careful!
If you make a mistake you can render the machine unusable.
(You should also make a backup of the registry before modifying it.)
All this said, if you want to try, you have to ADD the "DontAutoSave" key inside "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Excel". The key type should be DWORD and its value should be 1.
Also, as an introduction to editing the registry, you can give a look to https://www.howtogeek.com/school/using-windows-admin-tools-like-a-pro/lesson5/
Hope it helps...
Hi Marli van Staden,
You've got an option that may help. I'm assuming that you are using Excel and not Excel online to disable to autosave.
In File -> Version History you can find all the different versions of the document. This is where you can find the exact time for each version as well.
Within File Options -> Save you will find these options too:
I've tried these option and it seems that these settings are now simply ignored. It might be owrth it to send the feedback on this to Microsoft.
Thanks, but that method deals with AutoRecover rather than AutoSave...I do not want to change my AutoRecover feature, which is still very important to me...I want to stop Excel from saving over the files that I am currently working on (i.e. I want to maintain control of the timing of when I press 'Save'). This can be disabled easily for each file at a time, but the feature cannot be disabled at a global level for all Excel files, which is what is causing my frustration.
So then the only option is to use the version history. In the version history you can find the time that the document was previously saved. I agree that it is a bit painful.