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.
LMAO blaming the software because you’re too dumb to hit Ctrl + s. Presumably you’re old enough to have been taught to save often. Now maybe your daughter will learn from your fuck up and actually SAVE HER WORK.
Also she’s never going to learn to type well if you just do it for her. Get her Mavis Beacon for Christmas this year and stop doing her homework for her.
Nothing you say is wrong but best practice is to constantly save regardless of auto… we’ve all been fucked by this in the past.
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.
The amount of times I’ve fucked up my template documents for forms and had to go back and revert them because they were autosaving and I hadn’t set them to read only makes me not a huge fan of autosave being on automatically. Is the problem easily solvable? Yes. Have I somehow still not gotten used to autosave even though it’s the norm for like a decade at least? Also, yes. But there it is. A reason why for you.
Never trust autosave. Everything from notepad to Visual Studio gets the Ctrl+S treatment when something is updated.
Er, you lost your daughters essay because you assumed that autosave was enabled.
No Backup no pity
Us older folks automatically hit save every few minutes. But not saving days worth of work is asking for trouble.
I’m feeling old right now, thx
I even impulsively hit Ctrl+S when writing comments on Lemmy once in a while
You have to hit Ctrl+S 3 or 4 times in a row, just in case too.
This is how I play Pokemon yellow. Save game? Better save again just in case.
I tend to hit ESC :w
I sometimes ctrl+S on my web browser.
me too, but it’s beacuse that’s the emacs keybinding for incremental search
So did you want this as an .htm archive or what)
Young folk who have lost hours of progress in robotics programming projects too… Once is enough to learn your lesson. The inevitable second time is traumatizing. By the third time, you hit Ctrl+s five times after every paragraph.
I don’t think OP’s kid is gonna learn the lesson here. Sounds like Dad was handling the typing for her, and then when things screw up he’s blaming others for it. Not a good environment for a kid to learn in.
That was my sense too. OP isn’t letting his kid learn the hard lessons for themselves.
Also what kind of an excuse is it to say she sucks at typing? With practice she will improve, so let her do her own homework
I’m 28, do that too. Though maybe that’s what you meant by older.
No, whippersnapper, that’s not what I meant ;)
And “save as” every few times (or every time if the document is important).
I lost a lot of work hours once because I was using a program that saved a backup copy every time you saved (so that you’d always be able to recover the previous version), and the damn thing crashed while saving, thus corrupting both the save file and the backup. Never. Again. Hard drive space is less expensive than my time and what’s left of my mental health.
I worked as a kitchen designer and for each customer’s meeting I’d made a new file with everything the same except the date in the filename. So worst case I’d lose a day’s work.
“Us” don’t do anything, but we do.
I was going to say, it was absolutely drilled into our heads to save after every paragraph.
My high school teacher would occasionally flip the breaker for the computers in the school computer lab just to give those of us with bad saving habits a hard reminder.Your teacher would probably get raked over the coals for traumatizing the kids if she did that now
Meh, only the Libreoffice kids
Nah more for corrupting some of the computers storage drives.
I’m barely an adult and I do this. I think it’s less your age, and more the type of programs you tend to use—ei. programs where you may not want things auto saved, for me game engine, but there’s plenty of examples.
Few minutes? For me its every few seconds
I am an older folk. I grew up with an Apple II. I just have gotten used to autosave being on automatically in pretty much every word processor I’ve used since probably the mid-1990s. I just can’t imagine why they decided to not have it on when you install it.
I think your memory might be failing on this, because we’re about the same age and autosave wasn’t really a common feature in the 90s. MacOS didn’t introduce autosave until OSX Lion in 2010, and Microsoft’s auto-recover (which was their only feature even close to autosave until office365) wasn’t introduced until the 2000s and didn’t work properly until 2007.
Fair. I could very well be misremembering. I don’t have the greatest memory.
It happens to me more and more these days as well.
I don’t have the greatest memory.
You should have hit Ctrl + S more throughout life.
If only it were that easy.
It does for me, but I’m autistic.
I can literally decide “I’m gonna remember this thing” and then push it into my brain in a way that I know it’ll be there forever.
Agreed. It’s standard practice now. At the very least LibreOffice should ask you on document creation if you want it on.
There’s no reason to create the extra work of the past unless you are specifically making a nostalgia product.
What word processors? Even Microsoft office doesn’t have autosave on by default unless you’re working off of One Drive/Share Point online.
Why would you switch to different software and assume it works the same as another?
Yep, my thoughts exactly… my company doesn’t want us to use OneDrive because of some security fears, so none of our work has autosave. Just because it’s 2024 doesn’t mean everything has autosave. Even working in a browser doesn’t always have autosave, I use some online programs daily that you have to remember to Ctrl + S.
Never assume something works until you’ve verified it. And even then assume it’ll break some time
I mean, yes, but also it’s a fair assumption to make that autosave would either be on or the fact that it was off would be communicated.
A fair assumption maybe, but not a safe one.
the only time i ever lost a paper/document (at 13, for social studies), was on an apple IIc. then i rewrote it. i cried A LOT.
it has never happened since, and writing is a significant part of my job. i learned the hard way.
I just can’t imagine why they decided to not have it on when you install it.
Different generational audiences expect different UX about their software, as this topic has aptly shown.
I’m sure there’s a bunch of people who would be pissed off at the fact that they only want to control when a save happens (by default), and not the app.
Personally I would expect it to be on automatically (normal modern UX), but also after I’ve written big blocks of very important text I’d do a manual save, as I don’t know where in the interval cycle between automatic saves I would be at (when’s the next autosave happening). Best of both worlds, basically.
Finally, only because I’m talking to you right now, as far as you and your child goes, only you as their parent knows what’s best for them.
Take heart that if you’re trying, you’re already halfway there, as many parents don’t even bother.
And don’t take the negative downloading you’re getting on this topic as a criticism of your parenting skills, aholes on the Internet trying to keep the world exactly how they expect it to be from way back when, and are so hung up on responsibility to a fault, are not the best sources for knowledge on how well or poorly you’re doing as a parent.
I am an older folk. I grew up with an Apple II.
I as well. Still have fun memories of loading Choplifter into my Apple via a cassette tape recorder.
Thanks much.
Also, I’m going to have to go play Choplifter now!
I still do this regularly while using Google docs even though I don’t think it has any effect.
If only computers could automate repetitive tasks. Oh, well.
They can. Just have to turn the autosave on. Better to manually save still just in case
If only people understood the tradeoffs with automation
Auto save with Google Docs style snapshots has so little overhead I’d hardly consider it a trade-off. We have insane amounts of disk storage and extremely reliable non-volatile memory. The only reason against it that I can conceive of is confidential data you don’t ever want to exist outside of volatile memory.
All modern word processors use auto save and it kinda blows my mind libre does not do this.
I guess it’s about what one’s used to. I’d be pretty annoyed if it started overwriting my documents when I when I do not explicitly tell it to do that.
I copy something from the document, maybe hit cut instead of copy. Now it’s gone from the original.
Make them play Fallout NV, and then
TEACH. YOUR. KID. TO. SAVE.
First thing you teach someone who is going to use a computer, is to save the document every 4 minutes. Who knows when the power will go out… But I am sorry for her essay, and thanks for telling me that autosave feature is disabled by default. I would have never known.
You can set VSCode to autosave pretty much every keystroke. you should be able to do that for all office apps too IMO
and make sure you press Ctrl+S at least five times every time you want to save. I swear it sometimes doesn’t work the first time.
What is wrong whit your computer and why do you say that others should press ctrl-s five times like we were practising magic? Report a bug with the software that you use if it doesnt work, or replace your keyboard
I’m just joking. It’s a common habit software developers have for some reason.
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You are saying that because she worked hard she deserves a good grade.
No, I’m saying that because she worked hard on an essay she wrote, writing it again wouldn’t serve any educational purpose. I rewrote it with her sitting next to me, based on what I remembered that she had written the day before, so that she could help me remember what was written.
What educational purpose would making her do the whole thing again serve?
Also… maybe meet my daughter first before deciding a 13-year-old child is a monster?
What educational purpose would making her do the whole thing again serve?
Learning from mistakes. Learning that when you screw up, you don’t get a free pass to fix your mistakes. Learning to save frequently when working on a document. I can go on and on.
You are coddling your child and I feel bad for her.
It was my mistake, not hers.
So you’re saying she should learn that when someone else makes a mistake, she doesn’t get a free pass to fix it?
I should punish her for something I did? And if I don’t do that, I’m coddling her?
I mean I guess it’s not a terrible thing to learn that the people who have power over you will fuck you over when they make a mistake, but I’d rather her not think of me that way.
You do what you want with your kids. I’d rather my child not grow up to think her father was an abusive asshole who punished her for things she didn’t do or have any control over.
Look at how you’ve handled this situation so far. Seriously, step back and take a look at it.
First, we can skip the typing for her because that’s been discussed to death. But then, when you found the mistake, you immediately started typing again and even called it cheating because you were trying to sound like a 13 yr old girl. You are teaching her that using any means necessary to get a good grade is acceptable.
Next, you are trying to blame the software and not take responsibility for your mistake. This is teaching her not to take responsibility but to instead find something else to blame for mistakes.
No, you should not punish her for your mistake, but you should instead teach her how to handle mistakes.
I guarantee that this will happen to her in the future when she is typing her own work. She will get mad, blame the software, then cheat to get a good grade. This is what you’ve taught her.
No, you should not punish her for your mistake, but you should instead teach her how to handle mistakes.
I’m pretty sure I did by telling her I fucked up, apologizing and rewriting the essay. Which is what she would have been expected to do if she had fucked up.
Also, when you say I did not take responsibility for my mistake, are you not including the part of my post where I wrote:
it was basically my fault
Or did you just not read it?
I really don’t understand why you think me taking responsibility for my error and rectifying it teaches her a lesson that you should cheat to get a good grade. Because as far as I can tell, you keep suggesting that I should punish her for my mistake and make her rewrite it. Otherwise, what is your point here?
Yes. You should have made her sit with you and redo the entire assignment. Not as punishment, but as rectifying the mistake as she would have had to do had she been the typist.
Treat it as a learning moment and not as punishment.
You mean like when I said in my original post:
I did have her sit with me
First you claim I didn’t take responsibility, which I did, now you’re saying I should have had her sit with me, which I did.
Did you read my post at all?
And you still haven’t explained to me how me taking responsibility for my mistake, apologizing for it and then fixing the problem myself teachers her to cheat in order to get a good grade. Can you please explain that?
She already learned that lesson by watching her dad fuck up, then fix the problem with his own effort. If he made her sit down and do the whole thing over again she would’ve instead learned a lesson by watching her dad fuck up, then fix it by making it someone else’s problem.
OP already made it a learning moment. He told his kid it was his fault and he’d take responsibility for it. The kid also learned her parent has humility and has her back when things go wrong.
Sure, you can go the other route and have her re-write it, but I don’t think that would’ve been as good a learning experience for the kid. “Life sucks sometimes kiddo. Sometimes you do nothing wrong and still get saddled with extra work and strife.” The kid’s 13. Give em a break, Red Forman.
Jesus, mate! Calm down. Poor OP already feels like crap for losing their daughter’s essay, and you level some heinous shit at both of them. Plus, they were passing on a PSA for other users of LibreOffice, in case they get caught out by the same thing.
Don’t be that person.
Damn, you got hit with a severe case of triple bad luck (machine, software and humanness).
As someone who thanks to you got reminded to look at their software backup settings, thanks for your sacrifice.
So in unrelated news I had to replace a keycap because… yeah.
Sounds like she learned a lesson in the value of building the habit of doing a quick ctrl-s every minute or so, no matter what program you are using.
I love that there are still kids learning this hard lesson in the year 2024.
