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.
Some weeks ago I wrote my probabilities homework on LaTeX, every couple of lines I press F5 to compile and see how it was looking. I was pretty sure that compiling automatically saved the project, but I was wrong and lost and entire night of LaTeX work. Now I know that I need to manually save first, after that compiling save the project and the compiled pdf when F5.
I suspect losing a LaTeX doc hurt more than a ‘word’ doc
At least in LaTeX I’m not losing any “original toughs”, I first do the exercises on paper and pen and then format it on latex to send to my professor, but I’m not really used to it, so the writing process involve a lot of looking on internet how to do things.
I think it depends. In my case, I write faster in LaTeX as the formatting is done a lot quicker. Just need to find one template I’ve already used and is aproppiate for the ocassion.
Although being able to take a screenshot and paste it is a huge bonus and time saver in LibreOffice when taking notes in real time.
It has been a few years (shit near 15 years) since I used LaTex, and I didn’t use it that often so it wasn’t ingrained. But even then it was much easier than trying to get publisher for format things