Latest versions of Excel, Word sporadically close files without saving changes

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We have two reports now. @ITMgrGeek says: Excel is 1809 / Build 10827.20150. Had two files open, one stored on my One-Drive setup, the other stored on
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Elly, GreatAndPowerfulTech

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I was the anonymous poster. Confirm again, just a couple of seconds ago had Outlook 10827.20181 crash on me. There was a crash notification but it wasn’t visible for even a full second…

Then again I’m on the cutting edge on purpose, so that I’d see these problems before the supported end users do, and make a point to have alternate tools on hand for actual work.

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Elly, Jan K., woody

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As I understand it, @ITMgrGeek, running Win10 Home 1803 build 17134.345 and the latest Excel 2019 beta (Insider) build 10827.20150, had two files open in Excel:

• File A – on OneDrive
• File B – on his company’s server, connected via VPN

He had made no changes to File A. He had made changes to File B, but not saved them.

He “X”d out of File A — that is, he intentionally closed File A.

When he “X”d out of File A, Excel closed File B as well, without saving changes or prompting to save.

Sounds like the beta builds are buggy!

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@Woody, if that is ITMgrGeek’s normal way of doing things, he is living dangerously, in my opinion. Perhaps he was testing the auto-save functionality? That’s the only good reason I can find for someone to type in a bunch of work, then hit the X to exit out without having done a manual save of the spreadsheet.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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BobbyB, b

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He “X”d out of the other file.

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Elly, Ascaris

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Even if that is true, that’s still no excuse for an experienced Excel user not to manually save whatever he is working on every few minutes.

To me, auto-save is simply the icing on the cake, an extra benefit that might save me in the event of a disaster; I don’t depend on it to save my essential work – I do that myself manually.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Still, autsave should work in case of for example a crash of the software or OS (not that uncommon with Windows 10) or for example a power outage.

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woody wrote:

Latest versions of Excel, Word sporadically close files without saving changes

Once.

woody wrote:

We have two reports now.

… of two totally different things, and the one which apparently resulted in data loss could not be reproduced despite numerous attempts.

woody wrote:

… the latest Excel 2019 beta (Insider) build 10827.20150,

I don’t think Insiders get Office 2019, and that’s not the latest build of Office 2016 even for non-Insiders: October 16 Version 1809 (Build 10827.20181)

woody wrote:

Have you encountered something similar?

No.

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That’s true. I also haven’t seen any corroborating reports.

Still, it’s an eye-opening bug…

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Not sure if the user was depending on Excel to save his files, or if he tried manually to save his files.

I ALWAYS do manual saves, even though Excel 365 keeps reminding me that it auto-saves. I never like to take the chance that something will go wrong with the auto-save process.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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BobbyB, Chris B

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I agree. My instinctive ctl-S started with Word 2, when failing to save manually was reckless in the extreme, and the habit never left me.

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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Latka, bknight721

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Same here. I learned the hard way years ago about saving manually. I do it every few minutes or after any lengthy edit. It only takes a second or two to hit Ctl-S or click the save button and can save you hours of work to do it over again.

Group "L": Linux Mint dual-booting Windows 10 Pro.

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You do a “save as” on your first manual save, telling Excel (or Word) where to save the file and what name to use. From then on, you simply click the save button (or hit CTRL-S), and it will save the file exactly where you want it to be saved. Takes only a second to click that button, and it becomes an unconscious habit after doing it for a while.

You get religion quick on manually saving your work after one or two losses.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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As others noted it already: CTRL-S in MS Office (and not only) is your friend and became kind of a unconditioned reflex in my case – I learnt it hard way on one late night in the former century and have been practicing it with a lot of success ever since…

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Hm, yes, Word 2, used that one for a long time myself too… But my automatic habit still tends to be more in the way of ^[:w for some reason if both my hands are on the keyboard. ^S if the other hand is on the mouse, of course…

Autosave in Office is something I usually prefer to disable, because the silly thing also considers non-data changes as something to be saved. Excel is particularly annoying with that.

 

Yeah, sort of normal for the cutting-edge builds to be slightly buggy but this is feeling like more than just slightly.

Oh, forgot to mention, I’m running this on W10 pro v.1709 / 16299.726 as of now.

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Latka

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Maybe we should start considering data loss a “feature” and not a bug with Microsoft software.

Red Ruffnsore

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Elly, BobbyB, lurks about, Chris B, columbia2011

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That’s it Mr Natural. You’ve cracked it.

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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But of course Ctrl+S was “Send” in  Lotus Notes …

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I had a Word document and an Excel document open when I restarted the computer. I had already saved the documents before the restart.

After logging in and launching Outlook, both Word and Excel simultaneously launched themselves. No documents were opened.

I have used Word, Excel, and Outlook simultaneously for years, but never saw this behavior before today.

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That’s actually one of the wonderful new features of Windows 10. Woody mentioned this a while back. If you leave a program running such as excel, word, or outlook and reboot, the programs will open themselves automatically after startup.

Again as Woody mentioned this could present additional challenges if you’re trying to remove malware that loads at startup.

Red Ruffnsore

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I’ve experienced this problem daily since I allowed Office 365 update with the November updates, which I did in early December.

I run a set of Workbooks with macros in parallel on two machines.  One is a Windows 7 machine with Office 2010, and the other is a Windows 10 machine with Office 365.

Every day around 11 AM, the Office 365 set of workbooks would close, with no error, and when I re-opened them, there was no prompt for recovery or anything.  After restarting, the set of workbooks would be fine for the rest of the day.  I noticed that the time that they were being closed coincided with the execution of a background task for the Software Protection Platform, so I disabled that task.

When I disabled that task, Excel continued to run through the time that the task would have run were it not disabled, but I noticed that Excel had a massive memory leak.  Watching it after that, memory continued to grow until it got a crash error (instead of a unexpected clean close of the workbooks as it had been doing), with recovery files, etc., which it was not doing before.

After restarting and monitoring the memory usage, it does not seem to be experiencing any problems, and there is no obvious evidence of a memory leak after the restart.  These crashes seem to happen once a day around 11AM, and then after I restart things, everything is fine through 5PM or so, when things shutdown normally under the control of the macro.

I then started looking for any mention of random closes or memory leaks, and I found this thread.

The Office 2010 version, which is identical in terms of the set of workbooks and macros, but with a different set of data, has had no problems.

This all started after updating for November.

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