Surely, many users have encountered an unpleasant situation when, due to a frozen computer, a power outage, or other unforeseen circumstances, a document on which a lot of effort and time was spent was not saved. Just for such cases, the developers of Excel have specially provided for the autosave of the workbook, which will help save our valuable work. Let’s see how this feature works and how it can be configured.
Setting up autosave
In Excel, by default, documents are saved every 10 minutes, but we can adjust this setting to our liking.
Opening Settings
To access the autosave options, follow these steps:
- Go to the menu “file”.
- Select an item from the list on the left “Parameters”.
- A window with Excel options will appear in front of us, on the left side of which we click on the section “Preservation”, where all settings for automatic data saving are presented.
Settings
Time
The most important setting is “Autosave every”. Here we specify the amount of time after which the next automatic saving of the file will be performed. Most often, users set no more than 5 minutes, since for a longer time period you can make a lot of changes to the document, which, in which case, will have to be repeated again. It is allowed to set whole minutes (from 1 to 120), and we can enter the desired value in a special field or “walk” to it using the up / down arrows next to it.
Framework
By default, autosave is performed in the standard Excel format (“xlsx”). But if desired and necessary, we can choose another extension.
Storage
To assign a directory in which autosaved files will be stored, simply copy the full path to the desired folder (for example, in Explorer) and paste it into the field next to the parameter “Data directory for auto recovery”. We can also enter the address manually.
The parameter above should not be confused with “Default local file location”. In the folder specified here, the program will offer to save files when we decide to do it manually.
Other parameters
The settings of other parameters rarely need to be revised, and other things being equal, it is better to leave them as they are.
Disabling autosave
If you do not need to perform autosave, you can turn off the function. This is done by unchecking the box next to the corresponding item.
We also have the opportunity to leave the main checkbox, and disable only autosave when closing the document.
Conclusion
So, we just figured out how to set up basic autosave settings in Excel so as not to lose valuable data if, for some reason, manually saving the workbook was not performed. An extremely convenient and indispensable feature that will help out users who constantly work in the program more than once.