Oh man. After three hours searching the net and letting Microsoft remote control my new laptop, there is still no autosave toggle in my Office products.



Yes, I'm signed into my OneDrive. Yep, I was when I did four hours of work on a document on Friday and the autosave was working fine then. I open it this evening to round off the work and get it ready for the next stage and...none of the extra work I'd done was in there. It hadn't saved.

And autosave has vanished. No settings have been changed. WIthout it, I can't track back through other versions of the document and recover the work.

Anyone got any ideas! Eeeeeeppppp!!!!

Ouch, sorry you went through that.

I don't know whether this is a cosmetic solution or not, but for me, the autosave button is on my Quick Access Toolbar, and you should be able to re-add it at Customize the QAT, All Commands, "Turn AutoSave On/Off." Of course, if that doesn't activate it, the button is meaningless. But is it possible it got right mouse clicked and removed somehow?

As for the work you've done, I'm assuming you went through looking for any recovery options such as listed here: How to recover unsaved Word documents - Office | Microsoft Learn

For better or worse, "save and save often" is so drilled into my head that I'm constantly manually saving even in a program that auto-saves.

Best of luck,

Ann

You are likely in the "New Experience" mode of using Office.
New Experience - Microsoft Office - Office 365 - Turning it on and off
I have this turned off in my Word 2021 on Windows 11 but doing so is not easy.

That "New Experience" moves the AutoSave button into the Title Bar. If it is not there, you can still add it to your QAT.
Modifying the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) in Microsoft Word

Ann and Charles, thanks so much.

Ann, I've tried all that but it's the place to start apparently. Thank you.

Charles, megaphone not showing. (and boy, yeah, did I learn a lesson about backing up to multiple locations...I mean, dropbox, Mikey, dropbox...USBs...)

But ...

When I checked the "Account" in my Word app, it's saying Home and Student 2016. Which I would have purchased way back when and associated withthis Microsoft account.

This is a new laptop that came with the latest Office package. Is it possible it replaced that with the older version because I was logged in to Microsoft? (If so, I'm so done with this lol. I'll just be saving to USB and Dropbox from now on.)

Word does not work with flash drives. Using Word with documents on flash drives is the #1 cause of document corruption. You need to act as if you do not have any flash drives while you are using Word. You can use Windows to copy any document on a flash drive to your hard drive, use Word with it, and when Word is closed, copy it back if you wish.

This means:

• Do not open a document on a flash drive from Word or with Word.
• Do not save a document to a flash drive from within Word.
• Do not print a Word document while it is on a flash drive.

Thanks, consider this case closed. I did eventually recover the version myself (no thanks for Microsoft whose two support agents were less than helpful). Went into the 365 account, found the document there, opened it in Word for the Web and there were the versions (although several were still missing, I got the one I wanted).

Lesson for me: don't use Microsoft 365 or OneDrive. I've gone back to using Dropbox during a session and backing up to external drives.

Mikey, so glad you were able to recover your file. It's probably harder than ever to cross-platform across different computers and different versions of Word now that there's auto-saving to cloud drives.

I learned how to mark my own thread as SOLVED only recently, so I went ahead and did yours. It's under the "Thread Tools" you'll see at the top of the discussion.