Excel on a Mac - autosave and Time Machine...grrrrr!

[Tony B2]

I absolutely hate Excel on my MacBook!!!

It is so flakey.

It has once again (just like many times before) crashed and autosave/autorecover has failed as well as f*cking Time Machine.

It also has similar problems if the MacBook runs out of charge.

In spite of selecting "autosave" and having my Time Machine back-up disc constantly connected, several important Excel files that I have been using pretty much on a daily basis over recent months have not saved anything since 12 May.

I guess it is not a coincidence that the most recent versions on the local HD are pretty much the same as the Time Machine versions.

This is hugely frustrating as they contained important time related data.

In addition to expecting the back-up technology to do what I have asked it to, I also frequently save manually, and always before manually closing a file.

I am using Excel (not Excel 365) so a fully purchased one-time installation, v16.66.1 - I have checked OneDrive, and nothing recent is there.
Macbook is Catalina 10.15.7.

Any ideas on recovering the most recent versions of these files?

Reaching the point of using a hammer....!

[Captain_Morgan]

Catalina Was stopped support in 2022 or 2023.
I suspect that also means that that version of excel is also unsupported.
Along with OneDrive being out of spec.

I had problems with one drive issues when running out of support macOS &/or OneDrive.

I suggest you consider upgrading to a more modern version of on all aspects and see if this resolves it.

If you can’t because the Mac is not supported any more then consider open legacy patcher to run a more modern macOS. I’d look at possibly running that on an external drive to test it before committing.

Or buy a more modern mac

[Tony B2]

Captain_Morgan said:

Catalina Was stopped support in 2022 or 2023.
I suspect that also means that that version of excel is also unsupported.
Along with OneDrive being out of spec.

I had problems with one drive issues when running out of support macOS &/or OneDrive.

I suggest you consider upgrading to a more modern version of on all aspects and see if this resolves it.

If you can t because the Mac is not supported any more then consider open legacy patcher to run a more modern macOS. I d look at possibly running that on an external drive to test it before committing.

Or buy a more modern mac

Thanks for coming back to me.

I could well be aiming for a more modern Macbook, as after nearly 13 years this one has done pretty well.

I think that my version of Excel is still supported - will check again.

Really hacked off with Time Machine, though as that was my ultimate fall-back position.

I will do a search on "open legacy patcher" unless you have some readily available info?

[wyson]

Any reason for using a Mac?

Excel for Mac is a really poor cousin of the Windows version, which is much more fully featured and stable.

It’s the only reason why I have to run a Windows laptop. If the spreadsheets, links, lookups and formula’s get gnarly, Windows Excel is always more stable. Anything that has VBA in it, Windows Excel is the only option.

Edited by wyson on Monday 7th July 18:12

[cw2k]

Tony B2 said:

I
I am using Excel (not Excel 365) so a fully purchased one-time installation, v16.66.1 - I have checked OneDrive, and nothing recent is there.
Macbook is Catalina 10.15.7.

Thats not how Microsoft licensing works now, the yearly builds are just an upfront payment for a set period of support.

The difference between the yearly builds and subscription are just the way you are paying for the support and updates. With subscription it's included in the monthly cost, with the yearly version like 2019 and 2021 you are paying for the support and updates up front but that is for the period upto the mainstream end of support date, this is 10th Oct 2023 for 2019 and 13th Oct 2026 for 2021 (2016 was Oct 2020), within the support period you get the updated builds as long as you keep the underlying OS on a supported version.
If you have Office 2019 it can be updated to 16.78 which was the last release before end of support but that does require you to run it on Monterey.

For Mac OS Apple supports the current and past 2 major releases, most developers on mac including Microsoft follow Apples support cycle, outside of this Microsoft say it might work but they don't guarentee this, your OS build is 5 version behind the current so more functionality will not work.

[Captain_Morgan]

In the short term I would set time machine to a hourly or 30min schedule and then increment the file names if needed so you ensure you a a quick way to restore specific versions if needed

[PushedDover]

isn't a better solution a cloud based saving (I have OneDrive and Dropbox for example)

Let time machine overlap that.

[jan8p]

I use Excel on Mac for work in conjunction with OneDrive and it's pretty flawless, so I doubt it's 'the product'.

As others have said...OneDrive is free for personal and is the native sidekick to Excel, so if you rely on your versioning to function correctly I'd be going down this route.