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Marli van Staden's avatar
Marli van Staden
Copper Contributor
Dec 04, 2017
Solved

AutoSave feature causing frustration

As an independent financial modeller, I work on Microsoft One Drive as it ensures that my work is automatically backed up. This worked well for me until the new Excel AutoSave feature was enabled. ...
office 365
  • Salvatore Biscari's avatar
    Salvatore Biscari
    Dec 04, 2017

    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...

Salvatore Biscari's avatar
Salvatore Biscari
Silver Contributor
Dec 04, 2017

To disable AutoSave on a given machine through the Windows registry, see:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4036334/how-to-disable-autosave-in-office-365-proplus

Hope it helps...

Marli van Staden's avatar
Marli van Staden
Copper Contributor
Dec 04, 2017

Thanks, but I'm afraid that method indeed only allows me to do it one file at a time...which does not solve my problem for older files (because each time I access an old file, the file might be automatically saved even before I can disable the feature, meaning I lose the true 'last saved' details).

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