How to fix "There was a problem saving and AutoSave was disabled. Please Save As or close and reopen the file."

Question

Hi, so this is the problem we're having: Me and my colleague at work use Excel Spreadsheet (with VBA macro) in Onedrive for our working paper. It works just fine most of the time, but sometime we ran into a problem when saving our progress, it says "There was a problem saving and AutoSave was disabled. Please Save As or close and reopen the file." but when we Save As the file we then prompted with an error saying the file could not be saved and Excel has saved the workbook minimally. Though there are no files saved and when we close and open the workbook again, we've lost all the progress prior to the error messages, and the workbook became useless because we can't save anything in it, we then are forced to use version history to recover older version of the workbook or redo all our work from zero.

Is there any fix to this? Is it the macros or the Onedrive? Any solution will be great and highly appreciated. Regards, PT

Answer 1

I share the OPs frustration with this and quite frankly Microsoft, OneDrive, when dealing with shared Excel files, is not fit for purpose.

Imagine having a large intricate spreadsheet, getting this message and being told MS has only been able to save 'minimally'. These can be mission critical documents this is catastrophic for people doing real jobs and trying to work collaboratively. Microsoft your approach is cavalier in the extreme.

Here are some partial solutions and I hope this helps:

1. Often when microsoft onedrive throws a wobbly and say it cannot save and autosave has been turned off do this: press control-S. This forces a save and oftentimes I have found it to work.
2. If you've done some serious updates, run a macro or you just feel you want some confidence, press control-S and wait until the title bar indicates the file has been saved.
3. If you get the catastrophic message "MS has only been able to save minimally" with classic Microsoft cavalier aplomb then this will also probably occur even if you try a new name (which also a null solution for shared files). Generally I just exit without saving and recover what I've done by resorting to the saved file. #2 should ensure not too much is lost.
4. If all that fails and you lose a lot, curse Microsoft, then try to calm down by taking a break.