No more warnings about saving as CSV, especially when I didn't change anything
I don't know how many hundreds (thousands?) of times I've told Excel that, yes, I really truly do mean to save this file as a CSV. I recognize that not all users will understand that CSV doesn't do cool formulas or formatting, etc., but I do and I still want to do it. And I want to do it a lot. Please, give me a way to opt out of these useless warnings!
Tom VanAntwerp
shared this idea
2016-09-07
We’re done – you should no longer get a warning dialog about data loss when saving a file as CSV, as long as the file was originally opened as a CSV file.
Instead, we’ve added a non-intrusive business bar (that you can ignore if you choose) that let’s you quickly Save As the file if you have made changes that are not savable in CSV; if you ignore it and just Save, we’ll just save out the CSV values as you’d expect.
We actually rolled this out starting on August 13, 2016 with build 16.0.7167.2040 for O365 users. Later builds have this update as well of course.
Thanks for participating in UserVoice – we definitely value your input. You can now use whatever votes you’d allocated for this idea for other ideas.
Cheers,
Dan [MS]
= started status 2016-06-15 =
Great news – we’re working on this (for both Windows and Mac Excel)
Cheers,
Dan [MS]
older
Thanks for the suggestion Tom, and thanks to folks for voting! We’re listening to you all, and we’ll get someone to take a look at the flow here. We’ll loop back and update the status appropriately.
Best,
John [MS XL]
76 comments
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Anonymous
commented
I hate this. I constantly have to redo work and have lost all detail when pivot tables were added on another tab. It saves without any warning at all. You have to remember that you opened it as .csv an hour or more ago.
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asdf
commented
Absolutely stupid idea to remove the warning.
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Roy
commented
Your "non-intrusive business bar" disappears forever with one click, causing who knows how many people to lose hours of work. Saving a CSV gives no warning (not even a non-modal dialogue like the first business bar) that the only place your CSV-incompatible work will ever exist is your RAM and closing Excel will, unceremoniously, permanently delete it.
Good job, MS.
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Chris
commented
just happened to me 6 hours gone. why are there no warnings for this? why does it let you save your work only to not save anything?
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Anonymous
commented
It seems I've missed something, because I still get this horrible and stupid pop-up.
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TM
commented
Not having a warning is crazy. I've just lost a weeks worth of work as I was working in CSV format, happily creating new sheets without realising it would not be saved. When I re-open my file, voila all my work has gone. Excellent idea, not having a warning.
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Devon
commented
This checkbox is disabled for me in file>options>save but I still get the message every time I save. If i check it, and go back into options, it stays unchecked.
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Nick
commented
What a rubbish update!
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David Aldred
commented
@Frustrated
You can disable / re-enable the warning by going to File-->Options-->Save-->'Show data loss warning when editing comma delimited files -
So where in the program do I turn off the warning? There is nothing here that tells a user how to do it!!!!! If the solution is creating a macro, that is BS. There should be a simple checkbox in the save options to turn this off or on. WHERE IS IT?
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Dan
commented
Where is the business analyst? There needs to be a happy medium. Regular users need to be warned they are working in .csv so they don't loose data (arguably, they should not be working in csv in the first place), and developers/techs need the .csv save feature to be less obtrusive (you are prompted no less than 4 times, twice on initial save, and twice when trying to leave the document, even if there were no changes!). The balance is to notify the user upon initial save and then alter the UI when working in .csv. You currently can keep working in multiple tabs, even though you are in csv. This is dangerous for normal users and developers alike. A good balance would be to alter the appearance of non-active tabs or remove them completely upon save (or maybe provide a toggle to "work on at your own risk," after having prompted the user that .csv mode is being implemented. The irony of all this? This problem has persisted for years and MS still had not implemented a common sense solution. Again, where is the BA?
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R
commented
This **** is so typical of Microsoft - the worst software company on earth. My Christmas wish is for this company to go bankrupt.
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J
commented
Just lost few hours of important work due to this. No warning what so ever, while saving or creating / adding "xlsx" features into original CSV file. Either it should not allow to add these features, or give warning before saving as CSV. And it seems there is NO way to recover it either (from a .temp file etc)...
It almost cost me my job due to work on critical data on critical timeline.
Very Bad idea. -
Robert Bradford
commented
I'm still getting these warnings when saving as a .csv and .txt file in Excel 2016. How can I turn them off? It's already multiple clicks to get to the save as command and then more clicks to get the application to respond as I intended.
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Li
commented
Just lost 3 hrs of work b/c added macros to a .csv file that I did not know was a .csv file.
Programmed the macros. Saved it. Got no warnings. Opened it back up and, classic, all data was in col A and all the macros are gone.
Help? I need the warnings back!!! To loose 3 hrs is gut wrenching. MS didn't just throw out the baby with the bath water on this one, they threw out the whole bath tub. (This has happened to many people as you can see in the above posts)
At the very least (since MS is about as responsive as a dinosaur bone), does anyone have a workaround?
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Michael
commented
Removing the warning is wrong, I just lost 4 hours of work on other tabs, because I saved as a CSV (the file type I opened). Add a warning that you can disable if you don't need it, don't remove the warning altogether.
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Anonymous
commented
Hours and hours of work lost because there is no warning. This was a bad idea.
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Anonymous
commented
Yep, you have just cost me three hours work by only saving one tab of my spreadsheet because I based it on a CSV file. Thanks for that. A warning would have been really, really nice.
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ChrisB
commented
Aaaargh! I liked it how it was
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Chris Ford
commented
Unintended consequences, now Excel doesn't ask at all. Previously if I opened some form of txt file Excel would inform me of data loss on save and provided a simple option to rename with the xlsx extension. It no longer asks, and I have to type the entire name when I do the save as. This was not an improvement. I have lost data countless times and am frustrated as old habits die hard. Please correct this.
