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 Frank_Dawson ! After I wrote this post, there appears to have been an update to Office 365 which now allows for globally disabling AutoSave for an application. To disable this in Excel, go to File => Options => Save and uncheck the box "Autosave OneDrive and SharePoint Online files by default on Excel". Your colleagues would need to do the same, but hopefully this helps!
There are more problems. We have files online that already existed before this feature was introduced, but where we made sure the "Thisworkbook.autosaveon" flag was set to false. But any new user that opens the file will somehow ignore this feature and it gets turned on again by Excel.
Worse, I experimented with using vba code to programmatically turn off autosave the moment a workbook is opened, but somehow excel manages to already save before the user has had a chance to press the "enable macros" button. >.>
How do I permanently disable this feature for all users accessing my files in SharePoint, not just for myself?
- Hi! Please refer to the following documentation:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-it-administrators-should-know-about-autosave-88e0f80f-e5ea-441b-9c5a-259f08490ae7
AdamHello Adam,
Problem is I'm not an admin, not would I want to turn it off for all excel files everywhere - just for the excel files I created that other users work with. I had hoped it'd be as easy as simply setting the workbook.autosaveon flag to "False", but no such luck. Is there any other way I can turn off autosave when another user opens my workbooks, before the file is first auto-saved? (which is before the user clicks on "Enable macro's" apparently)
- Well, I get it! It’s a very different way of thinking and working! But as said you can try set the document as read only when opened! I would suggest trying to adjust though! There’s benefits as well and remember that you have version history for recovery in case of misshappenings!!
Adam
