I know that MS Office has a pretty reliable auto save feature these days, but just how good is it? How frequently does it save? Can you choose the frequency?

You can choose the frequency. I have relied on the autosave feature for some time, and I must say, it works great! I've never had an issue. I think I have mine set to every 5 minutes.

Mine is set to every 5 minutes as well, I change it to 1-3 when working on mroe important documents or if I expect issues which could cause problems. It is rather reliable and has saved me many timed from losing my entire work during a storm or random issue.

I have had a couple of issues with this in the past even though many years ago I still set it about 5 minutes but end up re-saving if I am writing up something rather long. I have lost stuff too many times before to not want to still click that save as button on my own.

Does Open Office have a comparable feature? I haven't used it before, but it would be nice if there was a way that I could auto save every five minutes on that too.

I was doing some work in Word one day and my toddler came up and pushed the power button on the computer and zap...it all went black of course! When I rebooted I actually got a message that it had been shut down and it gave me the option to restore all that writing would have otherwise been lost in that shutdown. I was a happy mommy!

I was poking around today writing some stuff up that I need to print off and mail and I had fully forgoteen that my updates were set to auto install and reboot. It goes into its pre-reboot deal and Im still typing things and Im screaming at my computer nooooooo

So today it saved me and for that I am thankful since it was a letter to a friend and I was already on page 4.

If I take longer than 5 minutes to do an email then I'm in trouble. If it is a huge email I will normally do it in Word or notepad and paste it into the email.

George