My daughter lost her social studies essay because LibreOffice doesn't have autosave on automatically.

Flying Squid@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 296 points –

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.

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Also, apparently crashes might reset the auto save tick depending on the version used, so check twice if it happens again just to make sure.

Oh just fucking great. Thanks for telling me that. I think I might just try a different office suite.

You can always try OpenOffice if libre office isn't working out for you. It has all the same suite options as libre office. I think it has auto save by default. I haven't used it in a while though.

Unpopular opinion: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are free on the web. Yes, you need a Microsoft account. Would it be ideal to use a FOSS product? Maybe. But schools and workplaces have a preference for Microsoft Office, so the specific skills in that office suite are going to more easily translate to real world situations, and there will be a lower chance of compatibility issues when sharing documents with other people or organizations, in either direction.

i wouldnt push excel hard here on the web. its still pretty fragile/full of incompatibilities to the point i cant use it in my day to day, i have to open the local application.

That’s fair, but it stands to reason that if a Microsoft web product isn’t super compatible with its own desktop product, a third party would be less so.

They’re free on desktop as well. Microsoft would so much rather you learn and love their tools that they’re happy to let you use them for free because it means you’re going to keep using them as an adult / professional / senior. My parents will never leave Excel / Word / Outlook because it’s what they know and love and they’re happy to pay for it in perpetuity.

https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

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