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.
Everyone learns compulsive ctrl-s eventually.
I was going to say we’ve all lost an essay before we learned to routinely save the document. :)
Yep. Unfortunate though this is, it’s an important lesson for OP and their kiddo.
Save early and save often.
The lesson for the kiddo is more complex and harder to learn: letting daddy do stuff for you doesn’t always mean it’ll be better.
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.
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. 🤞
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.
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.
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.
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?”
Unless she is has some sort of disability, you typing for her just seems like enablement.
But she’s bad at it, see
Yeah and practice is useless. Everyone knows you’re either born with it or not
My momma says I was born with yellow switch hands.
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!
I use Office 365 for work and I still CTRL+S. Something learned the hard way is hard to let go of lol
quicksave
Bound quicksave to the M4 button, same as F5/refresh. I’ll just spam it at all times, in all apps and games.
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.
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.
Never trust autosave. Everything from notepad to Visual Studio gets the Ctrl+S treatment when something is updated.
Is that because of bugs, or shitty software that you don’t trust autosave? Isn’t it likely that ctrl-s is affected by the same problem and regardless of how compulsively you press the combo, it does in fact nothing?
Note that OPs instance simply had autosave disabled, not really a trust issue
Autosave has intervals, shit can happen between those intervals
I’ve lost good work to a program crash / power outage / other sudden loss of work enough times to know that trusting autosave when it’s there is a fools move
Fair enough obviously a real issue considering that it is not just you but many other in this thread, that are posting the same or upvoting I do wonder what software, or and electricity grid you are all on and if you are typing from a war zone though. It has happened to me too, mind you. Once. It was some sort of word processor, in the 1990s before autosave. Been spending my days on a computer since then for work and hobbies, can’t say I remember a single other occurrence after that.
I do wonder what software, or and electricity grid you are all on and if you are typing from a war zone thoug
Bruh what? I live in California, wild to jump to questioning if we’re in a war zone. The issue is more often crashing software than it is power problems, as well.
Losing power goes beyond the grid though, you can have a power supply fail, animal turn off a power strip your PC is plugged into, a lightning strike can cause momentary grid interruption, a car can knock down a pole and take out local power for a few hours, an idiotic roommate can accidentally hit your PC and cause it to freeze, an animal can knock into your power button or switch and shut your PC down, you can accidentally hit your PSU power flip and accidentally shut it off, and more
All of these ive had happen to me. Not always while I was working on something, but many while I was. Auto recovery doesn’t always work for these kinds of things so it is ALWAYS a good idea to save
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.
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
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.
Auto save exists because everyone forgot to save sometimes.
But there are other situations that manually saving wouldn’t be solved and auto saving does.
Like it’s easier to lose data if something happens before you manually save it. With auto saving that’s more difficult as it is auto saving every x time or x changes. Yeah you could do that manually… every x minutes/work but it’s something that clearly should be automated.
The main issue here was assuming something has a feature and that it has it enabled without checking if it does.
You’re absolutely right. I got used to the convenience and got out of the habit of it.
So in unrelated news I had to replace a keycap because… yeah.
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.
Man, maybe I just grew up in a different time and/or environment but I still to this day manually save obsessively. I use VSCode most days and feel like I’m constantly hitting the save hotkey. With that said though, I am just not a fan of most autosaves. I like to know what the current contents are and whether or not I have unsaved changes.
That’s just me though.
Yeah, I don’t trust the auto save to save my work properly. I work as a Software Engineer, and any small change I make, even if I’m not done with the change and I’m just thinking, my hands immediately default to CTRL+S.
Always always make sure your work is being saved if it means something to you. Especially since windows will force update and reboot your computer. Battery’s can die, power can go out and your computer shuts down. Applications can and will crash.
Why do you trust ctrl-s though? You are a software engineer, you know that a bug in the piece of code that saves the document would affect both calls, regardless of whether its invoked by a timer or by the end user pressing keys, right?
I mean we have all been bitten by op’s problem In the past but it was exactly the same issue, autosave not enabled (most likely didn’t exist) what’s with all these, I don’t trust software to do it’s job so I do things by hand?
Particularly from software developers or other technical users. Found a bug in a piece of software, report it, you don’t need to change your behaviour for the next 20 years and tell everyone anecdotes about you still don’t trust a regression.
There’s a couple things… First, it’s a habit to be constantly pressing CTRL+S. I’ve been doing it for many years, I’ll continue to do it probably until I stop using a keyboard. It’s such an easy keystroke, since my hands are almost always hovering over the keyboard. Second, in some software you can create new documents without first creating a file on disk. This means that when I go to hit CTRL+S, it prompts me to save the file. That’s not to say that some software can’t save a recovery version of the document in the event the software crashes, but I’m not going to bet money on it working 100% of the time. I’d rather be proactive and personally make sure my work is saved. Gives me peace of mind.
I already covered your first point, you don’t need to.
As for your second point, autosave still does its job. The fact that you haven’t chosen a name and a folder for your document doesn’t mean that the software hasn’t created one on disk that keeps getting autosaved. When you decide to finally save the document, that file gets renamed and placed where you want it.
I mean this is trivial stuff that got solved a long time ago, I don’t see people on this thread saying I don’t trust electronic payments, I only write checks but somehow everyone think a basic feature is broken everywhere
Every single one of us has been bitten by auto save that didn’t work. I’ve personally lost hours worth of code to auto save glitches and poorly timed save runs. People don’t trust it because in the past it has had and/or caused problems with their workflow.
Ctrl+S is a manual confirmation that I saved it, and is a step taken before running any code, especially through a terminal in an IDE where if the auto save hasn’t kicked in will mean the changes aren’t reflected.
ctrl-S is deeper, older code. And yes, a bug in that would affect both manual and automatic saving. Meaning the bug has greater exposure and therefore would be detected faster.
More easily detectable bugs are less of a problem, because lack of alarm indicates lack of those bugs.
It’s this: (P => Q) => (!Q => !P)
Basically P is the bug existing and Q is someone detecting it. The more powerful the implication arrow on the left side of that equation, the more powerful the implication arrow on the right side. Or if you prefer probabilities: a greater conditional probability on the left means a greater conditional probability on the right.
Worse bugs that affect more systems are less worthy of the user’s attention.
If current_time > x invoke deper,older code that you somehow trust
Alternatively, more modern implementation suggested by someone else in this thread
At every keystroke, invoke deeper older code that you somehow trust
While not impossible, pretty hard to slip a bug into something like that and if it happens it gets identified,reported and fixed like all bugs. Users tend to be quite vocal about data loss.
Also some software developers tend to overcomplicate things, this is not rocket science
Mmm. I grew up in a different time too. Makes me ponder how the software circumstances of that time built in us a very different idea of what an iteration actually is, when it comes to writing. The fact that we couldn’t go back and atomically dissect the history of a piece. That a draft, and an edit, were something heavier. Maybe we’d have to think a bit more slowly and carefully before irreversibly casting a previous version into the ether.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making a “gen z bad” post. Just reflecting on how things are different these days, and maybe it leads to a different kind of work.
Thank you.
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.
Funny how OP is using libreoffice on Windows though, what’s there Linux-related to defend? Did a Linux user hurt you? If anything this is another opportunity for some snarky comment about Windows being shit and crashing for no reason since the 1990s.
“The year is 2024. Any car that doesn’t automatically brake when it encounters an obstacle is a shit car”
While the above may be true, it’s definitely not a reason to say:
“I shouldn’t have to use my brakes”
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.
Seriously, it’s 2024. Everyone has to use technology now, so the software should reflect that. UX is probably one of the big barriers to widespread FOSS adoption.
No worries LibreOffice has ancestry going back to CP/M (via StarOffice) so it’s on the DOS side of things: Of course it’s the fault of the software, it’s not a Unix native program.
Lol she didn’t do anything. It was the op doing his daughter’s work for her that didn’t save it.
That’s the most troubling part of this story, that the op doesn’t insist their child learn how to type. I’m wondering how much of their other work they do for her.
Libre office is open source, btw. If it’s so poorly designed op can go and fix it.
Whether or not OP can fix it hinges on much more than “if it’s so poorly designed”
How? How is this terrible? Why should autosave be expected? I absolutely do not like autosave. No thanks. It is an unusual behaviour, why would anyone expect it to do this?
That said, it is really weird that it didn’t recover. I have never hard Libre office not recover from a computer outage or even a forced shutdown. That is unexpected.
You’re weird. Autosave is the norm in 2024. It’s not unusual at all, and helps in the most important of use cases; accidental non-saving. It was the norm a decade ago.
You’re weird. Autosave is the norm in 2024
I do support challenging the software design before blaming the user, but I feel like I’m being thrown through a bit of a loop here. Autosave, while not unusual, is still the minority behaviour - surely?
I’m checking through tools I have installed and can’t find much that autosaves - even Word (tested editing a local file) doesn’t seem to autosave as far as I can tell. And, to be fair to the software, I often don’t want to overwrite the disk copy automatically (though there are some “best of both worlds” approaches, like with VSCode).
I would have sworn that autosave was enabled by default in absolutely every software that has anything to save since like the 2000s, you’re throwing me on a loop here.
As far as text editors actually, i feel like they may be constantly saving, particularly if they’re cloud-based. But i’ve been using LibreOffice for a while so i wouldn’t know. (and yes i did have to enable autosave)
I would have sworn that autosave was enabled by default in absolutely every software that has anything to save since like the 2000s
Possible that we’re thinking about different features? Like for Microsoft Word, if I save a file to disk, make an edit, then exit out without saving (hitting “cancel” when it asks if I want to save) the disk copy is left untouched. That’s how the most tools work as far as I’m aware. It does have crash recovery (which may or may not work better than LibreOffice’s crash recovery, no idea).
Some editing software will use a copy of your file as extended memory, so it is always caching to disk. That can be slow, so some don’t do it for small files. I am thinking of Linux tools like vi and vim.
No it isn’t.
And in the case of Word and Excel it only is enabled if you have One Drive, Office 365 subscription, or Sharepoint Online. And all of that started in 2023. Google Docs auto saves - which follows the pattern of needing to deal with state changes since the document is not local.
None of my local apps auto save. Some do auto recovery, but they are temp files until closed. This is not the norm in 2024.
What you refer to as auto recovery is what I mean as auto save. Even your email clients do it. I will concede if you can see the value of auto recovery.
Ok but what’s your argument against autosave? You haven’t made one?
Autosave has screwed me over many times. Not all changes I make need saving. Not all drives are always present during a save.
I have worked up what if scenarios and had it auto save, and now the document is missing the original.
I prefer to manage my own revisions.
Yea same here, I see autosave as a side effect. I want to be in control of my increments
People have said “I lost everything because of Microsoft Word.” “I lost everything because of Wordpad.” “I lost everything because of Notepad.” You guys probably blame schools for not teaching your kids how to laundry, taxes, or change a tire.
She didn’t lose her essay because the software didn’t autosave, she lost her essay because she didn’t save!
