Hello again and welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013.
In this section, I want to talk to you about Backup, AutoSave, and AutoRecover and we’re
going to look at backup first.
And when I’m talking about backup here I’m talking backup if you like in the longer term.
In the next section, we’re going to start to create presentations and as you create
your presentations, you’ll be saving them presumably on a drive within the device that
you’re using and when you finish doing what you’re doing for the day whether you’re
at work or at home you switch your computer off, you come back again tomorrow or the next
time you’re going to work on this course and you’re going to open up those presentations
and carry on working on them.
Well, what if when you come back tomorrow you’re computer won’t start?
What if when you come back to work next week somebody has stolen the computer you were
using or perhaps somebody else has used it and accidentally deleted or maybe even deliberately
deleted all of the presentations that you were working on?
What do you do about that?
Well, what you do about that is that you always have at least one backup copy of the work
that you’re doing and it is on a device other than the one that you are working on.
Now at the time of writing this, there are many options for taking backup copies of the
work that you’re doing.
You could, for instance, just copy the work to a memory stick, a USB memory stick which
would probably hold several gigabytes of data which may be hundreds of presentations and
which maybe will cost a few dollars or a few pounds from your local computer store.
Alternatively, you could have an external drive device.
Again, it could be a USB device which may hold up to one or two terabytes of data which
is probably going to be millions of presentations.
And again that will only cost 50-100 dollars, 50 pounds, something like that.
So there really is no excuse for not keeping copies of the work that you’re doing.
Nowadays many people work in such a way that as they’re working they have an external
device that is copying what they’re doing to the external device pretty much as they
go.
So it’s doing a sort of live backup of the data in real time and that’s a good option,
particularly if what you’re doing is going to be of great value to you.
From my point of view, what I do is I take a backup copy of everything without fail at
the end of the day, keep it in two places.
I keep it on my own network so that it’s safe at hand, but I also put a copy in, it
actually goes in the boot of my car in a locked box.
So you really need to make sure that you keep backup copies of your work and there is no
built in intrinsic feature of PowerPoint 2013 to do this for you.
There isn’t some magic tool that we can switch on, one option we can click somewhere
that will take offsite as they’re called, backup copies of what you’re doing.
That part of it is entirely up to you.
For the rest of this section we’re going to be talking about a pair of features called
AutoSave and AutoRecover.
And they are there to deal with an associated issue and I’ll come back to that in just
a moment.
But I would like to point out that they are not there to solve the problem that we’ve
been talking about.
They are not there as a tool for taking backups at the end of the day or making sure that
you’ve got a copy of a presentation somewhere else.
They’re there for pretty much a different purpose all together.
So let’s look at what AutoSave is about.
No matter how safe you’re working environment, things always go wrong.
For example if you’re using a PC rather than a laptop, there may be a power failure.
And if you get a power failure, your PC stops working, then the presentation you’re working
on may be in an indeterminate state.
If that happens, how do you recover whatever you lost?
Have you got to start the presentation again?
Another situation that might occur is what happens if PowerPoint itself fails?
The current versions of the Office products, the Office 2013 versions I’ve been using
for some time and I consider them to be relatively for what is new software at this time extremely
stable pieces of software.
But I know that as with any other software, there will come a time when that software
will fail.
It may not even be the fault of the manufacturer.
It may be something else on my PC that conflicts with it and causes it to fail.
But if it fails and I get one of those terrible “Not responding” type messages, again
maybe my only option is to switch my PC off.
If I’m partway through working on a presentation how much of it have I lost?
And this is exactly where AutoSave fits in.
So, into Backstage View, click on Options, go to the Save page, and one of the options
not far from the top there, Save AutoRecover information every, I’ve got it here 10 minutes.
And what that means is that every 10 minutes while I am working on a presentation, a copy
of it is saved automatically.
If PowerPoint fails or the electricity fails or there’s some other interruption to my
work that isn’t planned and controlled by me then when I restart PowerPoint, it can
revert back to that AutoSaved version.
And that in turn means that at most with this setting, I will lose 10 minutes worth of work.
So it will go back to the last point at which the presentation I’m working on was AutoSaved.
Now I can’t really think of any good reason why you wouldn’t have save AutoRecover information
set.
In the past, particularly with older computers that struggled a bit more to run the more
modern versions of Microsoft Office people would say, well, AutoSave slows me down a
bit or every 10 minutes everything seems to grind for a halt while it does an AutoSave.
Nowadays I think that tends to be a lot less of a problem.
So you really would need an extremely good reason not to have AutoSave set on.
You can adjust how frequently you run it and if you just click inside there the number
you can enter for the number of minutes can be anything from one to 120.
I think auto saving every one minute may be overdoing things a little.
And auto saving every 120 may be a bit too infrequent because you could effectively lose
two hours of work.
Ten is the default figure and it’s the one that I tend to run with.
Now there’s one other option there associated with AutoSave and that is the file location
where the AutoSaved copies are kept.
It’s set to the default.
Mine is here set to the default.
There’s a different one for each user of the device you’re using.
I generally don’t change this, but if you wanted to save that information somewhere
else, you could, of course, save it on a separate device if you wanted to.
There’s no reason not to.
Then you can change that location if for some reason you want to do that.
Although, of course, if you were going to use a different device it would have to be
a device that is connected and available all the time that you’re using PowerPoint 2013.
So what would the sequence of events be?
Let’s suppose you’re working on a presentation in PowerPoint 2013 and it’s on a PC and
you have a power failure.
Everything just grinds to a halt.
The lights go out.
You sort out the power fault.
You get the power going again.
You switch your PC on again and you start PowerPoint 2013.
As soon as you start it, PowerPoint realizes that there is AutoSave information and it
also realizes that you didn’t successfully save the last thing you were working on.
It then says to you, you didn’t finish what you were doing properly last time.
You didn’t close the presentation you were working on properly.
Things seemed to stop unexpectedly.
Do you want to AutoRecover from the last saved copy of the presentation you were working
on?
If for some reason it’s got the whole story wrong and you realize no, no that’s what
happened at all and in any case what I was working on I don’t want anymore.
You can just say No and carry on as normal.
Whereas if in fact there was some sort of catastrophe and you do need to go back to
that AutoSaved version you just click Yes, carry on, and it will let you continue with
the AutoSaved copy of your presentation.
It happens to me from time to time and so far it’s proved an excellent way of recovering
from that kind of disaster.
Now, not so long ago Microsoft added an additional twist on this which also has proved very useful
to some people.
When you have been working on a presentation for some time and you want to close the presentation
you normally get a question as we’ve seen before; Do you want to save changes?
You’ll usually say Yes.
Occasionally you might have made some changes to a presentation and you’ve changed your
mind and you’ve thought, no, no I don’t want to save those changes and you might say
No.
But something that happens to everybody eventually or at least everybody I know it’s happened
to, is that you’ve been working on a presentation, you close it, and it says Do you want to save
the changes?
And you accidentally click No.
Now this is a bit of a worst case scenario really because you’ve just appeared to have
thrown away all the work that you’ve been doing by saying no I don’t want to save
those changes whereas in fact you really should have saved those changes.
One of the other options that’s available here can help you to fix that particular problem.
Just below the options with the interval time on it, the 10 minutes in this case, there’s
another box that I’ve checked that says Keep the last AutoSaved version if I close
without saving.
And what that means is that everything’s fine.
You close a particular presentation.
It says Do you want to save changes?
You say No.
In the past, before this option was introduced, PowerPoint would’ve thrown away the AutoSaved
copy.
Now it keeps it.
And if having done that you close PowerPoint or you come back to PowerPoint later and you
think, ah, I said no to saving those changes and I really wanted to keep them.
There is a way of going back to that last AutoSaved version and I’m going to show
you that now.
So it’s pretty straightforward.
You go into Backstage View, click on Open, and down at the bottom there is Recover unsaved
presentations.
Open a recent presentation that was closed without saving and it really as simple as
that.
I hope you never have to do that.
I must confess I’ve had to do it once or twice.
Now at that point we’ve got to a situation where we can now start to create some good
PowerPoint presentations, and that’s what happens from now on, on the course.
Many of the things that we’ve covered have been essential aspects of understanding the
PowerPoint 2013 interface, understanding something about the Ribbon, the Quick Access Toolbar,
and so on.
But of all the things we’ve covered, in many ways those related to backup and AutoSave
and AutoRecover are the most important.
So although this isn’t actually an exercise for you to do I do want you to make sure that
you have those AutoSave options set.
You may choose to tune or tweak them later on in your use of PowerPoint, but make sure
they’re set.
They may well have never have been changed and just be at the default settings which
is fine.
But it is absolutely essential that you get those settings correct and that you make arrangements
for those backups to a different device so that you don’t lose your work in the longer
term.
So in the next section we’re going to make our first presentation, please join me for
that.