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.
Thank you! My God, the amount of holier-than-thou “it’s your own fault” in this thread is mildly infuriating in and of itself. Auto save and versioning have been a thing in Word for at least 8 years, probably over a decade but that’s the first version mentioned in their docs, and I struggle to think much software I use regularly that doesn’t have some form of it. Hell, even the new Notepad on Windows keeps your changes when it’s accidentally closed.
I like most open source software but this sort of attitude in the community and what seems like an absolute disdain for any UX concept from the past 20 years makes me very hesitant to recommend it almost anyone outside very specific technical circles.
People make mistakes, that’s why we automate things. If a system relies on a human not making mistakes it is doomed to fail eventually.
Saving manually should be a feature, but autoaave should be on by default these days, unless 30+ years of people losing work due to not hitting “save” manually has taught us nothing.
Crashes happen. Errors happen. Pets and children happen. Any major document editor should be able to auto save and replay a very long history of actions.
Improve the system, because you can’t improve people with a code patch.
It has taught us to take responsibility for saving our work
But a person can improve themselves before they can improve the software they work on. There’s less collaboration and centralized planning required for an individual solution to this problem.
I mean, it is? I don’t even use LibreOffice, but god I’m thinking of my help desk days and dealing with people getting angry at everything except themselves.
If people make a mistake occasionally or are willfully ignorant that’s a user issue. If almost everyone in this thread is talking about how you should push a button every 5 seconds on a machine designed to automate tasks maybe that’s a design issue.
If it were every 5 seconds, that would make sense for a cron job. If it’s “every time you’ve achieved a sense of satisfaction with the writing” then having the human do it makes sense because it’s an even based trigger and the computer can’t see the event.