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.
Us older folks automatically hit save every few minutes. But not saving days worth of work is asking for trouble.
I’m feeling old right now, thx
I even impulsively hit Ctrl+S when writing comments on Lemmy once in a while
You have to hit Ctrl+S 3 or 4 times in a row, just in case too.
This is how I play Pokemon yellow. Save game? Better save again just in case.
I sometimes ctrl+S on my web browser.
So did you want this as an .htm archive or what)
me too, but it’s beacuse that’s the emacs keybinding for incremental search
I tend to hit ESC :w
I was going to say, it was absolutely drilled into our heads to save after every paragraph.
My high school teacher would occasionally flip the breaker for the computers in the school computer lab just to give those of us with bad saving habits a hard reminder.Your teacher would probably get raked over the coals for traumatizing the kids if she did that now
Meh, only the Libreoffice kids
Nah more for corrupting some of the computers storage drives.
Young folk who have lost hours of progress in robotics programming projects too… Once is enough to learn your lesson. The inevitable second time is traumatizing. By the third time, you hit Ctrl+s five times after every paragraph.
I don’t think OP’s kid is gonna learn the lesson here. Sounds like Dad was handling the typing for her, and then when things screw up he’s blaming others for it. Not a good environment for a kid to learn in.
That was my sense too. OP isn’t letting his kid learn the hard lessons for themselves.
Also what kind of an excuse is it to say she sucks at typing? With practice she will improve, so let her do her own homework
If only computers could automate repetitive tasks. Oh, well.
If only people understood the tradeoffs with automation
Auto save with Google Docs style snapshots has so little overhead I’d hardly consider it a trade-off. We have insane amounts of disk storage and extremely reliable non-volatile memory. The only reason against it that I can conceive of is confidential data you don’t ever want to exist outside of volatile memory.
All modern word processors use auto save and it kinda blows my mind libre does not do this.
They can. Just have to turn the autosave on. Better to manually save still just in case
I still do this regularly while using Google docs even though I don’t think it has any effect.
I am an older folk. I grew up with an Apple II. I just have gotten used to autosave being on automatically in pretty much every word processor I’ve used since probably the mid-1990s. I just can’t imagine why they decided to not have it on when you install it.
I think your memory might be failing on this, because we’re about the same age and autosave wasn’t really a common feature in the 90s. MacOS didn’t introduce autosave until OSX Lion in 2010, and Microsoft’s auto-recover (which was their only feature even close to autosave until office365) wasn’t introduced until the 2000s and didn’t work properly until 2007.
Fair. I could very well be misremembering. I don’t have the greatest memory.
I don’t have the greatest memory.
You should have hit Ctrl + S more throughout life.
If only it were that easy.
It does for me, but I’m autistic.
I can literally decide “I’m gonna remember this thing” and then push it into my brain in a way that I know it’ll be there forever.
It happens to me more and more these days as well.
Never assume something works until you’ve verified it. And even then assume it’ll break some time
I mean, yes, but also it’s a fair assumption to make that autosave would either be on or the fact that it was off would be communicated.
A fair assumption maybe, but not a safe one.
What word processors? Even Microsoft office doesn’t have autosave on by default unless you’re working off of One Drive/Share Point online.
Why would you switch to different software and assume it works the same as another?
Yep, my thoughts exactly… my company doesn’t want us to use OneDrive because of some security fears, so none of our work has autosave. Just because it’s 2024 doesn’t mean everything has autosave. Even working in a browser doesn’t always have autosave, I use some online programs daily that you have to remember to Ctrl + S.
the only time i ever lost a paper/document (at 13, for social studies), was on an apple IIc. then i rewrote it. i cried A LOT.
it has never happened since, and writing is a significant part of my job. i learned the hard way.
Agreed. It’s standard practice now. At the very least LibreOffice should ask you on document creation if you want it on.
There’s no reason to create the extra work of the past unless you are specifically making a nostalgia product.
I just can’t imagine why they decided to not have it on when you install it.
Different generational audiences expect different UX about their software, as this topic has aptly shown.
I’m sure there’s a bunch of people who would be pissed off at the fact that they only want to control when a save happens (by default), and not the app.
Personally I would expect it to be on automatically (normal modern UX), but also after I’ve written big blocks of very important text I’d do a manual save, as I don’t know where in the interval cycle between automatic saves I would be at (when’s the next autosave happening). Best of both worlds, basically.
Finally, only because I’m talking to you right now, as far as you and your child goes, only you as their parent knows what’s best for them.
Take heart that if you’re trying, you’re already halfway there, as many parents don’t even bother.
And don’t take the negative downloading you’re getting on this topic as a criticism of your parenting skills, aholes on the Internet trying to keep the world exactly how they expect it to be from way back when, and are so hung up on responsibility to a fault, are not the best sources for knowledge on how well or poorly you’re doing as a parent.
I am an older folk. I grew up with an Apple II.
I as well. Still have fun memories of loading Choplifter into my Apple via a cassette tape recorder.
Thanks much.
Also, I’m going to have to go play Choplifter now!
I’m 28, do that too. Though maybe that’s what you meant by older.
No, whippersnapper, that’s not what I meant ;)
And “save as” every few times (or every time if the document is important).
I lost a lot of work hours once because I was using a program that saved a backup copy every time you saved (so that you’d always be able to recover the previous version), and the damn thing crashed while saving, thus corrupting both the save file and the backup. Never. Again. Hard drive space is less expensive than my time and what’s left of my mental health.
I worked as a kitchen designer and for each customer’s meeting I’d made a new file with everything the same except the date in the filename. So worst case I’d lose a day’s work.
I’m barely an adult and I do this. I think it’s less your age, and more the type of programs you tend to use—ei. programs where you may not want things auto saved, for me game engine, but there’s plenty of examples.
Few minutes? For me its every few seconds
“Us” don’t do anything, but we do.
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There are free 10 finger typing classes online. Frankly it’s a bit fun, similar to learning an instrument! I did one during downtime at work because I was a 6/7 finger typer, and always had to look for numbers or punctuation other than . , ! ?
It doesn’t take any money at all to learn touch typing: just google “learn to touch type” and there’s Mavis Beacon type software just written in js, totally free.
All that’s required is the discipline. If OP’s daughter sits with it 5 minutes a day she’ll be able to touch type in no time.
Learning as young as possible is the right move.
Mavis Beacon haha. For something not ancient, https://www.typingclub.com.
Furthermore, if the laptop randomly reboots for no reason, autosave won’t save you. You just need a tiny bit of bad luck for the computer to crash while saving, corrupting the perfectly-good file saved to disk.
Hardly how file saving works. Else you could say the same about a bit of bad luck for the computer to crash while pressing ctrl-s, corrupting the perfectly-good file saved on disk.
Too many people on this thread seem to see autosave and ctrl-s as two different things, governed by magic and mystery, one of them indispensable to conside nyourself an experienced computer user. It’s the same fucking piece of code, in one case invoked by a timer, in the other one by the end user pressing a key combo.
Op’s issue was that automated was disabled by default. Obviously autosave doesn’t work it it’s disabled.
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or instead of throwing more data/money at Big Tech try one of the self hosted instances of https://nextcloud.com/office/ or https://cryptpad.org/
This makes op a bad parent. Know this first op… The luxury of autosave is the least of your worries.
It doesn’t make them a bad parent. They are just making a poor choice out of what I assume is good intentions.
Everyone learns compulsive ctrl-s eventually.
Side note : You say she’s a bad typist so you type it for her. But how exactly is she going to learn how to type then?
Maybe just let her do things poorly and learn
Maybe just advise her to learn piano. Does wonders to one’s typing habits.
As I told someone else, I let her do it when it isn’t a long essay. With an essay, it would literally take hours.
With an essay, it would literally take hours.
Ignoring that this would get faster with the practise of typing it themselves:
How quickly are people writing essays these days? I’m a decently fast typer and it always took me a couple of hours to write a whole essay at that age. Once I was a few years older and was diligent in drafting a really good outline first I’d maybe get it to under a hour at the computer, but the speed of typing was never the bottleneck.
All it takes is a few minutes to give chatgpt a good prompt and the copy and casting to the text document. 🧐
Again, it can take her a full minute to type a sentence. She is an incredibly slow typist. This is really the first big essay she’s ever had to write and I wanted her to think about what she wanted to say, not hunt and peck for ages.
Look, maybe you don’t have kids. Maybe your kids are good typists. My kid has just started down this road of writing real essays and I have decided that typing speed is far less important than critical thinking when it comes to her education. You are free to make your own parenting decisions, but I would appreciate you not questioning mine, especially when you are not able to see the full picture when you don’t actually know either me or my child.
While I won’t debate your decision, please be sure that 1. You recognize how rediculously important learning to type properly is for today’s kids, and 2. That she may not want to learn, and is slow because of it. She may need a reward system, and a defined set time to learn. Good luck, and I hope it goes well for you.
Critical thinking is a high level skill. High level skills must be built on top of low level skills, and people learn thing better when they write themselves. The mechanics of putting the words to paper are an important part of the WRITING process.
I found with the few ‘public speaking’ presentations I did during school, writing down what I was going to say made me more diligent about information/points to bring forward and what phrasing to use. I suspect all this time spent on one specific thing greatly helped commit the topic to memory and by the time of presentation I didn’t need to rely on prompts to get my point across.
Are you going to type her emails and reports when she goes to work some day?
No?
Only the long ones?
Do you think maybe it might be better, if she is going to write an essay at her age, for her to think about what she is going to say and put it in a comprehensible and logical way than slowly typing things out letter by letter so that each sentence takes over a minute and she can work on her typing skills in other ways which require less creative thought?
No. All the other kids in her class are typing their own essays. Why isn’t she?
Which other kids would those be? She’s in online school.
And, as I said to the other person, feel free to do what you want with your own kids, but I feel that when my child is writing one of the first essays she’s ever written, her ability to think about it critically is, in my opinion, far more important to her education than hunting and pecking on a keyboard for hours rather than think about it.
I think that if writing takes a lot of effort it naturally makes people think more about what they’re going to write.
That’s a very neurotypical way of looking at the world.
As a side note, typing well isn’t something that can easily be learned by simply typing more. If her typing is a concern (and it may well be since she’ll be typing much more in college), it may be helpful to search for some typing courses. My impression is that there are some free online ones, but I don’t remember any off the top of my head.
I never truly learned to type, though I had a few weeks instruction in school, and did a few levels of Mario Teaches Typing when I was a kid. None of it really stuck, and typing remains an exercise in hand-eye coordination for me. I topped out at around 70-80 WPM if I’m composing rather than copying, but that’s been good enough for a lifetime of office jobs, and certainly for writing school essays. There is definitely a lower ceiling if you don’t get proper instruction, but simple practice is still helpful.
Perhaps, but that’s a relatively spectacular case. If my memory serves me correctly, the average typing speed is around 40 wpm. And sure, that kind of speed can get the job done but it definitely won’t be a good time. My elementary school was pretty forward-thinking in this respect. They signed us up for computer literacy and typing courses that would last for multiple years that we would do in computer class. I think everyone in my class was hitting at least 50 wpm by middle school. I was typing a solid 70 wpm.
Anyways, I think there are certain aspects of typing where having guidance could really help. I know people who chicken-peck because that’s just how they’ve always done it and they’ve never broken that habit.
Then let it take hours. That’s how you learn. She’s not going to learn to remember to save regularly if you just sweep the mistake under the rug and do the heavy lifting for her the second time around.
When I was learning Dvorak, I decided I would use it all the time. Even if it took me hours to write an essay. I now type 120 wpm. Practice works.
The only way I learned how to type growing up was from instant messaging my friends. All of those ridiculous typing programs didn’t help. One random thing that might help is a different keyboard, or, different profile keycaps!
I love me some mechanical keyboards and I like the tactile feedback from “brown” switches. The last one I built I found out about the wonderful world of keycaps, specifically keycap profiles. I fell in love with MT3s as they are a little “cupped”. My fingers sort of fall into the scoops and get enough tactile feedback to stay on the key and they just feel nice. I haven’t looked at cheaper membrane keyboards in years, but I remember you could pull off the keycaps and put different ones on those, but I have no idea how they are now.
If you are interested in mechanical keyboards, you can usually buy a sample kit that has all of the different switches and you may be able to find something similar for keycaps.
I guess what I am trying to say is a different keyboard, or even keycaps, may help her learn. Though I do realize that this stuff is expensive too. As someone who is on a keyboard everyday, it became a tool to invest in.
No need to go crazy with the first one. That first step from laptop keyboard or membrane pack-in is the biggest jump you’ll ever make in typing experience. a brown-switch gamer board with the RBG turned off and some cheap Amazon “CSA” style keycaps might be all you’d ever need. Of course, even that type of thinking can lead to certain… rabbit holes.
Just want to say, what a good parent for actually giving your child a hand in school work. The work load has become so insane for children.
Thank you, although in my case, it’s required. My daughter is in online school. It’s a public school run by the state, not a private school, so she has real classes with real licensed teachers via live videoconference and the assignments are graded by the teachers. They require a parent to be a ‘learning coach.’ Mostly to keep the kid on track.
But I also know my daughter has very little patience for bullshit, as I did I when I was her age, so when they say things like “to learn about biological cells, draw a picture of an imaginary factory and show the different parts of the factory and label how they work” (an actual assignment) and it isn’t being graded, it’s just busywork, I tell her we can skip it. I wish I had someone who let me skip that nonsense. Like you said, the workload, or in this case the expected workload is insane. And most of it isn’t conducive to learning. Drawing an imaginary factory- and they wanted kids to do this before teaching them the parts of the cell- isn’t going to help you learn what mitochondria are.
Meanwhile, she’s getting better grades than she did when she was in public school. It’s working out pretty well.
Drawing an imaginary factory- and they wanted kids to do this before teaching them the parts of the cell- isn’t going to help you learn what mitochondria are.
That sounds like it’s an exercise meant to get the kids thinking about a multi-faceted system existing inside a single structure, with parts that are interconnected but distinct, and will lead into a common metaphor teachers use to teach about biological cells. Not being graded means they’re not judging the kids on what they know or don’t, but want to evaluate where they are with this sort of thinking and figure out what they will focus on. Also, your kid may be smart and already know where they’re going with this, but others in the class may not. If she does, she could probably knock that out in fifteen minutes. Even if you decide that she doesn’t need to do it, I don’t think it’s stupid busy work, at least not necessarily.
Some teachers are dumb; we need too many of them and pay them too little for each and every one to be a superstar. The ones coming up with curricula and lesson plans usually aren’t, though.
Oh that sounds like a much better situation. I only found out public online schools were an option in my second to last year of high school, when the bullshit work load had already been waning. Doing it mostly online now for college and it’s so much less stressful. Wish you both luck. 🤞
While I can understand you wanting autosave on in your situation, I much prefer autosave off because I often open files to see what is in them and do not want to automatically modify them just because I accidentally hit a key and delete it. Automatically changing stuff is a choice you should have to make, not a feature that I have to race to disable.
Exactly. I don’t want my computer doing things without me telling it to. If I want it to save the file I will tell it to save the file. If I don’t tell it to save the file, I most definitely don’t want it to save it behind my back. Auto save is an anti-pattern, especially if it overwrites your manual save files.
(Saving an independent recovery file, preferably including undo and redo history, might come in handy in case of crashes, sure, but it should be optional and never on by default, out of privacy concerns; other users might use the computer, and it’s safer to assume that the previous user might not want others to see the documents they had open last time.)
I work with 365 and have to create docs from yesterday’s version (or last weeks etc) all the time. Auto save can be a real pain in the arse.
Turn it off, save as <yyyy-mm-dd-DocName>, oh hell auto save is back on…
Just mark it as final then. This whole thread is infuriating. People working themselves into pretzels with their misguided reasons for not wanting auto-save when they really just don’t know to use the software.
OP is right. I use Office 365 and haven’t lost work on a document in over 10 years. Auto-save absolutely should be the default.
Or not trusting autosave because they lost a document once in the 80s when autosave didn’t exist, and now they tell everyone to compulsively press ctrl-s because software can be trusted enough to drive a car, but not save a file every minute or so. Bonus point when they introduce themselves as I’m a software developer…
Yeah so maybe when we trust software to drive cars, then we can talk about trusting autosave.
What freaks me out is when I open a file, make no changes, go to close it, and I get “Do you want to save the changes you made?”
Yes. Like many here, I’ve learned to hit save A LOT. But I also want to decide when the time is right. Whether I’m writing a paper, coding, photo retouching, whatever, I flail around and experiment while working. I want to lock in my changes when I’m happy with the progress. If something goes awry I’d rather resume at the last manual save than some other weird thing I did afterwards.
The most mildly infuriating thing about this post is a parent not letting a child do their own work because they would do it slowly. I’ve read all the responses, clearly OP is not willing to reflect on what others are telling him. I just feel sorry for the child whose peers are getting practice in basic life skills that she won’t have the opportunity to because her dad thinks he knows better than her teachers and the curriculum. His own ego is so wrapped up in his child writing a good essay and showing ‘critical thinking’ that he’s not letting her do her own work. He admits to cheating. Just a wretched situation that I hope turns around when another adult steps in or his child gets old enough to tell him to back off.
Never trust autosave. Everything from notepad to Visual Studio gets the Ctrl+S treatment when something is updated.
On the other hand… consider if your cat had walked over the keyboard before it rebooted and replaced it all with
hhhhgggggggggggggggggggghgfbefore it auto saved and replaced the document. Would you still be an advocate for auto save?It sucks to lose work, but this is clearly a user error.
UXD would state that this is a software design issue, and not user error. The software should be designed with crashes and “lost” user data in mind.
That is true. I could’ve sworn LibreOffice had a recovery mechanism similar to MS Office after a crash.
Even LibreOffice can only recover what has been saved. And if autosave is off, there might be less to recover than desirable. Again, that’s a UXD problem.
To be fair, you could just delete the faulty part or click on Undo, and just save again.
It sucks to lose work, but this is clearly a user error.
Didn’t wanna say it but yeah, 100%.
Also I was kinda suspicious of the simultaneous claim that the PC randomly restarted and LO crashed. And there’s no recovery file. But that’s probably just me. For all the faults Windows has, failing to catch programs with unsaved work when restarting isn’t one of them I’ve ever experienced.
This is an insane scenario: my software design decision is, despite recovery mechanisms like previous versions, file history, and undo mechanisms, I’m afraid if a cat uses a keyboard I’ll accidentally save changes I don’t want to a word document.
Lol. The only user error was choosing libre office instead of a user friendly software stack that has reasonable defaults and r recovery mechanisms.
Yup. The fear is input that wasn’t intended to be saved, being saved.
Your inability to comprehend the scenario doesn’t erase it.
You realise if it’s saved you can now use features that are built into the software, that get saved, like using ‘track changes’ to accept or discard edits granually. You have file system level version control to choose previous versions, you have an undo feature built in. Three different tools to use.
Libre office is fine. You have no need to bash it. And it does have recovery files, this example is… odd.
Auto-save can usually create a new save with a timestamp, every time it saves. It´s called incremental auto-saves.
I’ve never seen this feature
I don’t have a cat and we did this out at a cafe, so yes, I would still be an advocate for it. I think that most people do not have that issue even if they have a cat.
Can confirm, have a cat and don’t have that issue. Because I lock the screen when leaving the machine unattended.
ThE sCrEeN sHoULd AuToMaTiCaLly LoCk
That’s why I lock my machine before walking away. That’s <windows key> + L for those who don’t know.
Command-option-Q on mac
CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S
Shit, did I save yet?
CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S
I don’t fuck around, that’s how I play my games too!
Unless she is has some sort of disability, you typing for her just seems like enablement.
I wouldn’t have learned to type if a teacher hadn’t lied to me and told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to go to high school unless I could pass a basic typing test. It enraged me at the time when I found out, but it was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me in the long run.
My mom was like you, well intentioned and getting involved a lot, to my detriment. I’ve never been able to get across to her that I would have been better off as an adult if I’d been allowed to struggle and accept consequences more as a kid. This became extremely apparent to me when I went to boarding school as an older teen, and had to catch up fast to my more self reliant peers. Getting away from people going overboard to help me was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I watched the same pattern play out with a lot of other students who had overly loving parents. The road to hell can be paved with good intentions.
Typing things for your kid is like reading things for your kid—it is such a fundamental skill that not being forced to reach your potential in it will massively change your life for the worse. My mom was a teacher for over 20 years, and the three biggest factors in success were reading ability, reading comprehension, and typing (as the modern form of writing). None of those skills are going to be obtained with anything other than exposure, practice, and time. You can give someone tools for practicing, but you can’t do the practicing for them.
I saw in your comments that your daughter has a learning disability, but all of this still stands. She will be judged against her peers as an adult, regardless of her diagnosis, so it’s best to start finding ways to work with it now.
3 take aways from this that I hope you’ll get:
- Learn to save often. Sometimes that means 5x in a row just to be sure.
- Never just assume the software is going to save you from yourself. Its OK to trust software, but you gotta make sure it does what you expect it to do. In this case, that means either checking those settings when you start out, or making sure the file exists on disk.
- Invest in some typing games for your kid so they learn how to type properly and can do their own work! I understand wanting to help your kid succeed, but you can’t do that in the long term without crippling their development.
This is the most classic case of “safety feature makes people unsafe” I’ve ever seen.
This kind of thing didn’t happen before auto save, because everyone knew to save.
The responses have classic “I run Arch” energy. It’s never the fault of the software. It’s always the fault of the user. Ignore them. This is terrible UX and should be criticised. She did absolutely nothing wrong.
This thread is absolutely terrible. I’m very sorry op. As a software dev, I think I’ve hit the save button maybe ten times in the past 2 years. You are right that it should auto save by default. That’s just required in this day and age. People saying they don’t want auto save because they don’t want cats losing their work literally do not understand how auto save works in the vast majority of modern systems. A simple example is Google sheets, where you can literally see every change made to every character in every file throughout time. You’re not going to lose anything. Software devs solved this in their own tools literally decades ago. My job is literally editing text files all day long. I can’t remember the last time I lost data due to a crash or a cat or anything.
Some people even mention LaTeX which literally has a solution with Overleaf. If software doesn’t autosave in this day and age, it’s shit software.
What you have here is another case of Linux users jumping to defend the only things they have to defend, even if it’s absolute shit.
