Earlier today a window popped up that said I had to save my open Office applications so that the system could update Office. So I saved my files and clicked Continue. Once updated, my applications re-opened automatically.
I made some temporary changes in an Excel file. When I closed it, I expected to get the ‘Do you want to save your changes?’ pop-up. I didn’t. I opened the file in which I’d made the temporary changes, and the changes were still in it. Now, I can undo the changes because I highlighted the inserted records. Easy enough to sort on those and delete them. But I shouldn’t have to.
How do I tell Excel to ask if I want to save the file upon exiting?
I’m not sure quite what you’re saying here. Something seems garbled vs. what you probably meant. But I get the gist, if not the details. I’ll take a stab at an answer:
The last few years’ versions of Excel have autosave on by default. Every few seconds your workbook gets saved to the cloud. There’s literally no way other than abrupt power failure to lose work.
When autosave is on you don’t get prompted to save because it was already done for you. And the designers assumed you turned autosave on, so you know about this and expect this behavior.
Each workbook stores this setting separately. So if you inadvertently flipped the switch on one of your workbooks that might explain your confusion. Or maybe if you normally are working on ancient sheets that have been edited for years but you recently started in on a new one that’s behaving differently since the default autosave setting has changed in recent Excel versions.
In any case, in current version Excel 365 with a workbook open you’ll find the autosave slider at the extreme upper left corner of the title bar. And if you navigate to File >> Options >>Save you’ll see how to set the default autosave behavior.
Here’s part of the official documentation; you can google up plenty more:
If I make changes to an Excel file, and then close it without saving, I should get a pop-up that says ‘Do you want to save your changes?’ I may or may not want to save them, depending on what I’m doing.
Now, if I make changes in an Excel file, it does not ask me if I want to save my changes. If I re-open the file, the changes have been saved. I don’t want that.
I’m going to head north, so I’ll look at your link later.
I can’t do F11 remotely (I’m on a Mac). Also, I have zero experience with macros. ISTM that there should be a toggle in one of the menus. (It also seems to me that turning autosave on during an upgrade is stupid.)
You really don’t want the macro-based solutions MSFT posed as learning exercises for learning to program VBA.
One of their samples disables the “Are you sure you want to close this without saving?” question and simply closes without saving. Oops on all your hard work.
The other sample is the opposite: You can’t close without saving.
Neither of those are relevant to your goals when sliding the existing autosave toggle from “on” to “off” does exactly what you want easily. They’re intended to teach non-programmers how the internal controls of the save feature work. And like many MSFT tutorials, they’re accurate descriptions of how to do something dumb or dangerous. In the interest of making the example exceedingly simple, they end up making it exceedingly stupid too.
As to an Excel version upgrade altering the default, there was method to their madness. As always. But since it was distant to your own use cases it's not obvious.
The version that introduced autosave was the version that also introduced simultaneous editing of the same cloud-based worksheet by multiple users on multiple PCs. Which it turns out is a very common big-corporate ask. IOW:
We’re all sitting around in our weekly status meeting on Zoom looking at the same Excel workbook. It’s how we keep track of what everyone is doing every week. Why can’t we all be editing it together so nobody is stuck being secretary and any changes anyone makes instantly appear in everybody else’s copy?
So MSFT made that happen. But it can only work if all the users have autosave turned on. And once autosave is on for some workbooks, most users are real clueless and workbooks that aren’t autosaving will be closed unsaved, losing hours of work. Losses that “stupid MSFT” will be blamed for. So when autosave first came in, “on” was the default for all workbooks created from that point forward. But not for old existing workbooks.
For you and I who don’t do simultaneous multiple edits of workbooks this all seems pretty irrelevant. And it is. But back when I had a desktop laptop and a travel laptop and occasionally forgot to close a key workbook on one device or the other, I was sure glad I could get all my changes previously made on the opposite device then add my local changes and it all just worked.
I haven’t read your link yet, so I don’t know where to find it yet.
From my perspective, there’s madness in their method. Like making you jump through hoops to have leading zeros on ZIP codes. Or Access randomly re-sorting (through ‘logic’ of its own) a sorted file that you import. Now, many of my programs (Easytrieve) sort the files. But once the final file is done and it needs to go through Access so that it can be exported as a fixed-position text file, I need to make sure it didn’t un-sort it on upload.
At least for the Windows version of Excel, the toggle location is described by me in my post. The msft link was for further background or additional questions you might have. Or if you needed info on the Mac version which I know some of your work involves.
I strongly suggest you try out autosave for a while before disabling it. If you make a few changes you don’t want to save, you can just CTRL-Z until you get back where you want to be. If you make a lot of changes, you can always restore a previous version of the file.
To restore previous versions in 365 click the filename dropdown at the top, and select ‘Version History’. This will allow you restore your file from any point you like. If you are using a different Excel the path to find the history may be slightly different, but the effect is the same. It’s always saved, just pick the one you want.
AutoSave only works if the document is stored on OneDrive and is the newer XLSX format not the older XLS format (same for word DOCX vs DOC, and PowerPoint PPTX vs PPT). If the original document was moved to a OneDrive folder and/or upgraded to the newer format that could spark AutoSave to turn on. The toggle on Mac and Windows is at the top left of the window.