Disable AutoSave for Office 365

This article describes how you can disable autosave in Office 365 for every file with the use of PowerShell.

Some background info on the Autosave feature

If you are using Office 365 and your store your files on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online you will see that the new Autosave feature is enabled by default. This options will save your changes to the cloud as you are working.  It will also make sure that others that are working on the same document see you changes in seconds.

This feature is only available on Windows for Word, Excel and Powerpoint 2016 for Office 365. The question is, can we turn it off (forever?)

Using the options menu

You can set the default behavior for the autosave in function in the options of any Office 365 program (Word, Excel or PowerPoint).

• Click on File
• Select Options on the left side
• In the options menu, select Save (4th options)
• Uncheck the first option : Autosave OneDrive and Sharepoint files by Default

Now it’s good the know that you will have to change the default behavior in each Office 365 program.

Disable AutoSave for Office 2016 ProPlus

According to Microsoft there is no option to disable AutoSave for all files, you will have to turn it off for every file independently.  Not really workable in some cases, but luckily there is an option to disable the autosave feature through the registry.

Run the following PowerShell code to create a new registry subkeys to turn the feature off:

$path = "HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0"

Set-ItemProperty -Path $path\Word -Name DontAutoSave -Value 1
Set-ItemProperty -Path $path\Excel -Name DontAutoSave -Value 1
Set-ItemProperty -Path $path\Powerpoint -Name DontAutoSave -Value 1

If you want to restore the feature, simply remove the subkey DontAutoSave in the given path.