Word to autosave new docs to the cloud before you can even hit Ctrl+S Ever get that sinking feeling when Word crashes before you've made your first save? An application update is set to save the day by automatically enabling autosave to the cloud for new documents, before you've even given them a filename. The feature, currently available to Microsoft 365 Insiders, adds an option to Microsoft's …
It was bad enough that MS Office requires *three* clicks on tiny, semi-hidden hidden UI elements to not save to their crappy cloud, but now they make it mandatory??
And it was bad enough that they disabled AutoSave for local files, forcing you send every click and keystroke to their cloud if you didn't want to lose your work..
A friend does transcription of medical records. She takes care to save locally and to wipe local copies after uploading to clients. The clients require Microsoft Word. I would love to believe that this was sufficient to convince the clients to change that requirement.
I remember typing my dissertation in word 6 on a 386 and it would crash whenever I got to about 12 pages. My girlfriend had word 2 on a 286 and that crashed about every 6 pages.
We quickly learned the value of autosave.
But rather than autosaving, it would be much better if it didn't crash. That would be a much better feature.
Are they really admitting that after 30 years they still haven't fixed the crashing problem?
I shouldn't have to turn off this cruft, because it should be off by default! And my blood starts boiling that enterprises and - even crazier - public institutions are paying to be the product. But I suppose that so long Micro$oft has the money to bribe the enterprises/institutions, they'll keep using M$'s crapware.
I apologise for the drama, but this is just insane.
Also, icon, because that's how I feel when I have to argue with stubborn MS defenders - every day, 5 days a week.
It's not just sweet deals and backhanders, but that fact that many large corporations (and smaller orgs as well) hold M$ stock in their portfolios.
See the scale of the problem now?
No, no, there's no conflict of interest here! No siree! Don't even think such a crazy commie thought!
What, you couldn't just save it locally like Notepad++ has been doing for a decade?
Shit like this is why I dumped Office 365 and just bought an Office 2021 license for $40. Sadly I do need Office, because I need real Excel (LibreCalc doesn't cut it) - but Office has been nothing but enshittification since 2021, so paying flat $40 and never getting any random UI or AI enshittification is an enormous plus! There has been absolutely nothing added in the last 4 years I'd want and so much I aggressively Do Not Want. I'd strongly suggest this to anyone who has to have Office for company interop.
I recently bought a new pc which unfortunately came with win 11.After severs hours of work I think (and hope) I got rid of every instance of msedge so I wouldn't have mr slurpee stealing my data. For the same reason I set up my pc as a local account and ignored the prompts to create a mictosoft account. Gawd, that was a pain.
I sounds like that even though I have msoffice 2016 on this pc I may have to do the same to keep mr slurpee from stealing my data anew. And I'm pretty sure I got rid of all instances of onedrive as well. I use my 16TB NAS instead.
I suspect Microsoft (and Broadcom/VMware, Oracle, IBM/RedHat, and most other vendors of enshittified products) are probably turning the F-U knob up over time, knowing that they'll lose some customers now and then, but still believing those that stick around are committed to their products, for better or worse.
And in some cases they're probably correct. Vendor lock-in and such. Plus the executives at those enshittifying companies don't lose no matter what happens -- golden parachutes all around -- so they aren't deeply troubled if a few customers manage to get free of the hostage situation.
That's exactly it. I fthey'd gone from where we were (say) a decade ago to where we are now - there'd have been hell to pay and mass defections. But MS (and others) have been adept enough to boil this frog slowly - each change small enough that it's just not worth the effort and pain of leaving, but each change (deliberately) making it just that bit more effort and pain to leave in the future. Until we reach the point where even government sized customers (the civil service is around 500,000 users IIRC) don't apparently have the ability to escape - though I can't help thinking there's more politics than technology in that.
A new Win 11 deployment I did earlier this year already had this.
It was annoying as hell. And they have also hidden being able to save to anywhere but the cloud. It's still barely there, but you really, REALLY have to hunt for it though several very non-intuitive menus and very tiny type.
And it just gets worse from there.
Why is it that a company can unilaterally decide to redirect everythin to their own servers without user consent ?
Oh, sure, users consent because if they don't they can no longer use the product. In any other domain that's called blackmail.
So ?
I had the same today, I got a form in Word from the practice of a surgeon who had recently done a rear-endian procedure. They wanted me to edit and return basically all my details as they had cocked up the insurance submission.
I thought I had saved locally before replying with it attached, but no, it was on muff drive.
Sneaky as hell
"WTF, you still have to manually save on Word??"
I am honestly surprised. I can see from the comments that some do not like this change, in particular if it saves to the cloud, but really, I haven't had to save manually or to think which directory my new document was saved to since 2011, and I don't miss it one bit.
The funniest and most ridiculous thing ever is that people don't need to use office or windows at all. There are other options. You can jump into another walled garden with - arguably - slighly less offensive practices, or switch to Linux and be set for life basically.
But no, for some masochistic reason people prefer to make up stupid excuses about super advanced expert uses of Word or Excel or other bullshit nobody believes in anyway.
You don't want to switch because you are affraid to, and that's OK. We're all affraid of new stuff that changes the way we work or interact with our computers. You can do it gradually, heck - you can go back. You can have things installed alongside your Windows. You don't need to defent the aggressor and make up excuses to try something new and - quite possibly - much better than the thing you're currently using. AND - nobody's watching you (well, unless you're on Windows), so you're free to try at your own pace. People, have some self-respect and build up the curiosity to try new things. I know it might be hard at first, but when you get to know things they become easier and actually start feeling like home. Just don't do 1:1 comparisons.
I have to fight with our QA at each release because our products manuals are written with Help & Manual (which generates both the online help and pdf manuals from the same sources...) instead of their ugly "templates" (actually, they are not even real Word templates, just document examples). They assert their "templates" are the anointed one by the compnay, and I send them to hell.
But they would force us to code with Word if they could - they believe Office is the Everything.
Downvote, not because I disagree with the sentiment, but you vastly oversimplify the problem and underestimate the difficulty in leaving.
On a personal level, yes you can use LibreOffice (other packages are available) and ditch all the MS stuff altogether - the last Office I had on my (previous) laptop was (IIRC) 2008, and I haven't used it for a long time.
But while this article is about Word, MS has spent the last decade or three boiling a frog to the point where Word, Excel, Outlook are almost irrelevant to the problem - it's no longer about file formats, it's about the APIs and integration. It's the whole stack of many different tools, all (seemingly) integrated with a "one click" option to use it all. It's sold on the premise of not needing your own technical people; not needing any servers; not needing to think about storage requirements, upgrades, and all that; not needing to think about security; no needing to think about backups & recovery; ... - just log into your admin portal, add a user, get them to log in and as if by magic they have the whole suite of tools.
It all started when MS though dubious (some found in court to be illegal) abused their then dominance on the desktop to kill off competition for file & print services. When they'd done that, they then used their de-facto monopoly in file & print services to further consolidate their dominance on the desktop. And with that, again through illegal means such as using private APIs not available to third parties, they set about making it as difficult as possible to not use Word and Excel and thus kill off any meaningful competition. And over time, they've added tighter integration, more tools, etc., etc. until we've arrived where we are. There is no alternative to M365 without losing a heck of a lot of functions and tools
About ten years ago at a firm where I was the BOFH we had a user who would come to IT literally screaming if the network hiccupped in the afternoon because she'd lost her day's work. We learned that when she sat down to work in the morning she'd start a new document for something like a major tender or proposal, work all day, and only when she was wrapping up to go home would she save it. (She probably wouldn't have bothered at that point had we not frequently rebooted overnight for updates.) When people (not just IT) pointed out that this was asking for trouble she countered that she didn't want to give it a name until it was complete.
There's little scope for dealing with that type of user - other than to deliberately make her computer less reliable.
Another sort of user I've had was the type that wrote a document and attached it to an email - but then deletes the document before hitting send on the email.
