This is about the most recent version of LibreOffice on Windows 10. I can’t speak for other versions.

My daughter worked hard on her social studies essay. I type things in for her because she’s a really bad typist, but she tells me what to write… but I didn’t remember to manually save her social studies essay yesterday, and for some reason the ThinkPad rebooted, LibreOffice crashed and we lost the whole thing… because autosave was not automatically on when I installed it.

No, recovery didn’t work. We just got a blank file.

I rewrote it for her based on the information we had and what I remembered and tried to make it sound like what a 13-year-old would write because it was basically my fault and she did do the work. I did have her sit with me as I wrote it in case she didn’t like something I wrote, but it was sort of cheating. I’m okay with that cheating since I know she worked hard on it.

First, though, I went into the settings and turned on autosave.

I like LibreOffice, but why the hell is that not on automatically? Honestly, I don’t really understand why someone wouldn’t want their documents autosaved, but I’m pretty sure most people would want that.

This isn’t fucking 1993. I shouldn’t have to remember to save a document anymore and it shouldn’t be lost forever because of it.

Like I said, I like LibreOffice. I don’t really want to trust documents to Microsoft or Google. But this was really annoying.

  • BezierEnglish
    2•9 months ago

    I guess it’s about what one’s used to. I’d be pretty annoyed if it started overwriting my documents when I when I do not explicitly tell it to do that.

    I copy something from the document, maybe hit cut instead of copy. Now it’s gone from the original.

    • Flying SquidOPEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      I’m not sure what you mean by overwriting. With something like Office365 or Google Docs, it saves each time you type or delete a character. I don’t see any reason why that couldn’t be the same with FOSS software.

      • BezierEnglish
        2•9 months ago

        Overwrinting as saving the (unwanted) changes over the file.

        I know the workflow on these collaborative online tools is like that. I also don’t see a reason why an offline tool can’t be like that, but I think turning it on by default would cause more bad surprises for people who don’t expect it to do things unannounced and without asking.

        I guess this is something the program could ask on initial startup and make the editor UI very clear on what the state is.