Autosave documents in Word, Excel, Powerpoint

There is now a "feature" which has lost me documents (or would have had I not had backups).
As many people do, I sometimes load an old document to act as a template, making suitable amendments and saving it under a new name. The problem is that unless I remember to immediately save this under a new name, this new feature can autosave the new version over the original version. One has to save it under a new name before doing anything else.
I know I can switch it off for each document but I want it to be off as a default.My research shows that so do many others!
I did find a registry hack but I couldn't find the key words referred to.

Sigurd said:

There is now a "feature" which has lost me documents (or would have had I not had backups).
As many people do, I sometimes load an old document to act as a template, making suitable amendments and saving it under a new name. The problem is that unless I remember to immediately save this under a new name, this new feature can autosave the new version over the original version. One has to save it under a new name before doing anything else.
I know I can switch it off for each document but I want it to be off as a default.My research shows that so do many others!
I did find a registry hack but I couldn't find the key words referred to.

Hi there

another "get around" is that if you regularly use a document as a template for creating new documents you could make it "Read only" so when you open it you will be immediately prompted to save an editable version under a new name.

However you should be able to turn auto save off if you need to -- and of course obviously having decent backups helps (as always).

I usually in any case after I've created a Work type document always make it Read Only unless it's going to a corporate / shared server as part of a teams project documentation library (most of my colleagues will say "Whats documentation" !!!! as is typical I think on a lot of projects these days).

Word docs aren't so bad but it's much more irritating if you hose up a power point doc / complex spread sheet / visio drawing or a project 2016 type doc with a lot of CPA (critical path stuff) on it. !!!

sometimes autosave can be a real pain if after an update settings get reset.

Cheers
jimbo

But why should I have to do any one of these work arounds? I can see the (minimal) advantage of having the autosave, but why give the option to switch it on or off only for the document being worked on? There should be a master switch as well.

Word, as possibly every other program around, prompts you to save your document before closing it, Life's not so short that we need to save ourselves a couple of mouse clicks!

Hi there

Try this

Go into OneDrive settings and under "Office" uncheck "Use Office 2016 to sync Office files that I open".

You should now see in open documents in any Office Programs, the "AutoSave" is Off and grayed out.

Cheers
jimbo

Tried it - no joy I'm afraid.