How to autosave an excel file to Dropbox every 10 min

I just spent two hours on an excel file only to have excel crash before i saved it and lost my work. I am using MS Excel 97-2004 on a MacBook Pro and right now have to manually save all work. How can I set up MS Excel/Word/PPT to auto save every 10 minutes to my Business's Dropbox account? I want to be able to work without having to manually save my file every few minutes.

1 Accepted Solution
Accepted Solutions

Chris_J

Super User ‎03-13-2018 02:08 PM

There isn't a way for Dropbox to do this but as I understand it there is an auto-save feature in Microsoft Excel. I believe most versions have this. Take a look at this article https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-autosave-and-autorecover-to-help-protect-your-files-in-.

Hopes this helps

if this works and it was a solution, please click on Accept as Solution . Also clicking on Likes would be super. Thanks!

22 Replies 22

Chris_J

Super User ‎03-13-2018 02:08 PM

There isn't a way for Dropbox to do this but as I understand it there is an auto-save feature in Microsoft Excel. I believe most versions have this. Take a look at this article https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-autosave-and-autorecover-to-help-protect-your-files-in-.

Hopes this helps

if this works and it was a solution, please click on Accept as Solution . Also clicking on Likes would be super. Thanks!

Helpful | Level 6 ‎03-21-2018 09:19 AM

The problem is that Excel automatically turns off (and greys out) the auto-save function when saving to Dropbox. So there's no way to enable auto-save when saving to Dropbox.

Is anyone at Dropbox aware of this issue and working with Microsoft to resolve?

It's possible Microsoft does this to encourage people to save to OneDrive instead of Dropbox.

Rich

Super User II ‎03-21-2018 10:41 AM
@D L.5 wrote:

The problem is that Excel automatically turns off (and greys out) the auto-save function when saving to Dropbox. So there's no way to enable auto-save when saving to Dropbox.

If you're referring to auto-saving directly to your Dropbox account then it's very likely that Microsoft prevents that as a way to force OneDrive use. There are even topics on Microsoft's forums that discuss this, and the usual answer is to use OneDrive.

However, the auto-save feature just needs a folder on your computer, and you can easily specify your local Dropbox folder. Any files that are auto-saved to the Dropbox folder are then synced like any other file would be. I have my local Dropbox specified as the auto-save location in Excel and it's never been an issue.