Turn on autosave right now, before we do anything else
Before we type a single number, I need you to go and turn on autosave. Not "in a minute." Now. I will wait.
Understand me. I do not care how organized you believe you are. I do not care if you are the sort who saves obsessively, Ctrl+S every four seconds. Autosave still matters, because the one moment you forget is the moment something goes wrong.
Mine was apple juice. Dawson, who was three at the time, climbed up next to me while I was mid-formula on the budget sheet and dumped a full cup of apple juice straight into the keyboard. I lost about twenty minutes of work. Not because the juice destroyed the file, the file was fine, but because autosave was off and I had not saved in a while, and the laptop needed a minute (and a towel, and a small amount of panic) before I could even get back in. Twenty minutes does not sound like much until you are staring at a blank formula bar wondering what you had already figured out.
I turned autosave on that day. I have not turned it off since. Consider this me preaching.
How to actually do it
If you're in Google Sheets: you do not have to do a thing. It is already on. Every change you make saves automatically to Google Drive, and you will see "Saving..." or "Saved to Drive" in the little status area near the file name. This is one of the genuine advantages of Sheets, and I will say it plainly, even though I mix up my shortcuts between the two platforms constantly.
If you're in Excel: it depends on where your file lives.
- If your file is saved to OneDrive, there is a toggle at the top left labeled AutoSave. Flip it on. It should turn from gray to on, and now Excel is saving your changes continuously, same as Google Sheets.
- If your file is just sitting on your computer's hard drive and not in OneDrive, AutoSave will not be available at all. You have two choices: move the file into OneDrive so autosave works, or get serious about manually saving every few minutes with Ctrl+S. I will tell you, I think the first option is better. Fewer things to remember is always better.
Either way, take thirty seconds right now and check your setup before we move on. This is the least exciting five minutes of the whole course, and quite possibly the most important.
Why I'm this insistent about something so dull
Because the dull things are what save you. When I talk about spreadsheets in this class I get livelier about formulas and charts, because those are the fun parts, the parts where you actually get an answer to your question. Autosave is not fun. It is a seatbelt. You do not think about it until the one day you desperately need it to have been on.
This ties to something I believe rather firmly about the whole subject, which is that precision you will not maintain is worse than a rough habit you will actually keep. A perfect manual-save routine that you follow for two weeks and then forget is worse than autosave, which you turn on once and never think of again. Set up the thing that protects you on its own. Do not lean on your future self to remember to be careful. Your future self is busy, or distracted, or has a toddler with a juice cup.
A quick related story, because it's on my mind
I spent a whole Saturday once, building a chart to show our grocery spending by month. I was proud of it. Colors, labels, the whole thing looked sharp. I showed Casey, and he looked at it for about four seconds and said, "okay so we spend a lot in December."
That is it. That is what he got from my entire Saturday.
And that, you see, is the chart working. It is supposed to be boring and obvious. I bring it up because it is the same spirit as autosave. You put in the setup work once, it does its job quietly in the background, and the payoff is not exciting, it is only that nothing bad happens. A good chart tells you one true thing without a paragraph of explanation. A good autosave setting means you never have to tell me your apple juice story.
One caution, stated plainly
Autosave means you cannot "undo" a bad session by simply closing the file without saving, the old trick where you close without saving to throw away a mess you made. Once autosave is on, your mistakes save too. That is fine, that is what Ctrl+Z and version history are for, but it is a real difference in how these tools behave, and I would rather you know it now than be surprised by it later.
Before next time
Go check your autosave setting on whatever you are using for this class, Sheets or Excel, and if it was not on, turn it on before we build anything real together. That is the whole assignment.
- C