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.

  • intensely_humanEnglish
    17·
    9 months ago

    Critical thinking is a high level skill. High level skills must be built on top of low level skills, and people learn thing better when they write themselves. The mechanics of putting the words to paper are an important part of the WRITING process.

    • autokludge@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      I found with the few ‘public speaking’ presentations I did during school, writing down what I was going to say made me more diligent about information/points to bring forward and what phrasing to use. I suspect all this time spent on one specific thing greatly helped commit the topic to memory and by the time of presentation I didn’t need to rely on prompts to get my point across.