Autosave Form Edits, or Warn About Leaving Page

Michael _M

My biggest gripe with SmartSheet (I am forced to use it by my company) has to be the autosave feature. That it is not active by default is egregious, and the fact that it's a personal setting per user makes it difficult to quality control.

Beyond that, I learned today that the form editor does NOT autosave as you work, and if you leave the page (by accident or on purpose), you will lose all progress since the last save. I just lost 30 minutes of edits by clicking a link that existed WITHIN the form editor interface. I did not know it was going to change my webpage instead of opening a new tab, and I expected a "leaving this page will discard your progress" warning message… None of this happened and instead I was instantly removed from my editor and progress erased.

What the heck were you guys thinking? Monday.com autosaves EVERYTHING, ALWAYS. It's vastly superior in user experience. It's 2024, cloud is here. Make changes autosave and offer a way to rollback to previous versions if you mess up.

*EDIT - After revisiting my sheet it looks like the columns that were created from within the form view did save, however they did not save in the form view itself. I still have to add each column back into position, mark it required, add a helpful description, etc. So I still lost some of my verbatim type from before. Slightly less annoying, but still a massive gap in workflow.

Michael _M

For reference, this is the button I clicked that took me off-page. It is from within the form editor, and it should NOT open in the same tab without a warning. Either make these links open in a new tab or provide a pop-up warning to the user that they are about to lose their progress.

I'm also realizing that the columns saved from the form view because they are part of the sheet and the sheet autosaves per my personal settings. IF I did not have autosave on the sheet, my original complaint would be fully accurate still, and would be for other users who are in this scenario.