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Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

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Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

#11

Post by gigglesupstairs »

jackjackk0 wrote: post #8
openssl wrote: post #7

21 years ago when I used Windows 2000 I faced such problems. One would think those kind of issues would be resolved by now. Anyway I’m a developer so this may not be for everyone. I use markdown+git for documents. If I must use office, I write in gitlab markdown first (auto backups) and then copy into office

Please note the Word was at its latest version of the Microsoft 365 package. I definitely sympathize with your approach (as a nerdy engineer) but unfortunately I don't see my wife's profession compatible with such plain text acrobatics...

Use Onedrive. You already have 365, it comes with it. It has auto save, which is a lifesaver.

Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

#12

Post by sharmi »

As you had specified in a different response, you did save often. If that didn't help, you could use Google Docs as others have suggested.

A third option is "LibreOffice Writer". I have not lost a doc/sheet on it yet. Even if I shutdown the system with an unsaved doc, the next time I open writer, it will prompt me for recovery. The caveat is, there might be small formatting and alignment differences. When I open a MS doc in Libreoffice, it output is formatted a bit differently but it might not be Libreoffice and might just be because of the different font stack available on my Ubuntu OS. Libreoffice is available for free though. So you can give it a try.

Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

#15

Post by [deleted] »

jackjackk0 wrote: post #3
antasvara wrote: post #2

In all honesty, the easiest solution is to save more frequently than every few hours. OneDrive is definitely an option as there are some autosave features though.

Please note that the problem was not the lack of frequent saving per se, which was done. The problem was that it took just one corrupted save (the last one) to destroy the benefit of all previous saves. Unless you meant save in different files, which would become cumbersome very quickly.

[deleted]

Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

#17

Post by krater23 »

cloudking wrote: post #9

Google Docs solves this problem. Every revision is auto-saved in the cloud. It's come a long way since it was released 2006, pretty much has fidelity with every major Word feature. Also it's free with a Gmail account.

But there are many things that you don't want to store on a giant software company's computersystems that's specialized on examining data.

Re: Half a day of work lost thanks to Microsoft Word

#20

Post by 908B64B197 »

> For the moment, I would say, use OneDrive (maybe it was part of an evil playbook by MS after all...)

OneDrive won't change anything if you never save. From Word's point of view it's a regular path and just like writing to a disk.

You need to turn on AutoSave. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-on-autosave-...

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