The minutes of the Design Team hangout: 2015-12-18 contain details of the rationale behind the change. Basically, as indicated, saving has become more complex and varied.
Thanks for pointing that out. They obviously thought it was a good decision, but in my opinion it is very confusing now 
thx for the link with the notes.
just in 3 lines the icon was changed on ideas of 2 people ? wow …
why merge “save as remote” into the normal “save”-button ? useless for millions !
instead use 2 buttons ! e.g. as in the past, where applications had a “save”-button and a “save as”-button.
why change things that are around for decades and disturb the 30+ people, which are used to this good old things ?
the modified state in the status bar is also harder to spot then old save-icon in the toolbar.
It’s a matter of training yourself to use it.
I have 30+ years of training.
why I have to train again for every (even minor) version of application xyz ?
why you spent al lot of time developing things, so that we have to spend a lot of time to learn how to use it ?
from a professional view: LO is on the right track.
like M$ annoying old user base with doubtful changes and inventions.
there was a save-icon discussion in 2012 or 2013 and LO learned nothing from it?
I totally agree. Usabililty-wise this is not an improvement. Please change it to the old situation! I also found out that the save button in the macro section is corrupted now. It now is always purple whether or not the macro has been modified. So now one is unable to see if the macro is saved after a change.
If the user interface is going to be changed constantly without user input, we might as well use Microsoft Products, they do that on practically every release of all software.
The Standard menu Save button action was changed to a split-action. It was necessary to support the frequently more common use of cloud based storage.
The issue and objections are well covered in Bug 98745 - Bring back Save as singular .uno command where folks should note we have implemented an Expert Configuration option to revert to a single action local Save button for those that insist.
For releases 5.1 forward
Tools → Options → Advanced “Expert Configuration” session and searching
for “SaveToolbarController”then edit the “controller” string replacing
“com.sun.star.comp.framework.SaveToolbarController”
with
“com.sun.star.comp.framework.GenericPopupToolbarController”
on LibreOffice restart, restores the
non-split button behavior to the
Toolbar “Save” button.Reverse steps to restore the Split button.
For 5.2 forward we have also provided a SIMPLESAVE button action that can be added by customization of the Standard toolbar.
Stuart
=-ref-=
tdf#96590 UI: save icon does not give a hint of the document status
tdf#97878 Failure of Save icon
tdf#98745 Bring back Save as singular .uno command
tdf#98779 UI: “single action” save icon doesn’t give a hint of the document status
Adding split Save button to Standard toolbar
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=4f69d0810e76f17b2a24f74dc99c4b8a31ac63b7
Adding an optional “simple” Save button for customization use
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=ae00a95ea458a0328d7b12d25c231e9f4ac8eed8
For 5.2 forward we have also provided a SIMPLESAVE button action that can be added by customization of the Standard toolbar.
How does this work? I’m using 5.2.0.4 but I don’t see any SIMPLESAVE button in the standard toolbar. Where can we find this?
For 5.2 forward we have also provided a SIMPLESAVE button action that can be added by customization of the Standard toolbar.
How does this work? I’m using 5.2.0.4 but I don’t see any SIMPLESAVE button in the standard toolbar. Where can we find this?
This was a poorly thoughtout UI change. I don’t know the breakout, but I would bet that 80+% of users are editing local files, not remote. Having a greyed-out icon to indicate no changes makes sense. If you don’t know the state because the file is remote then you can use the new behavior.
In a worse case situation, at least give us a preference to change it back to what we want.
Rule 1 of UI design is never surprise the user. Another one is, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
I will now have to go back-rev to get this feature back.
This has been driving me crazy. I use keyboard shortcuts primarily, but I do look at the icon to determine state (saved or not-saved), because almost all software has used this convention for years and years, some applications even change the background color to alert you.
That’s why I’m staying with v4.4.4.3. Everything works like I need it to. Later versions messed with some of the “features” that I use frequently and changed them for the worst. When I posted concerns on Bugzilla I was met with either “we changed that on purpose, so live with it” or “yeh it’s not working right but it’s not that important so we will fix it when get to it”. I am really concerned about checking out newer versions because I am reluctant to find out what else has been “broken” in the name of progress.
I tried the solution above to change the save button back to something more useful for me and I suspect most users. While the edit got rid of the star button and reverted it back to a single icon the save no longer reflects a save I.E. it doesn’t grey out to show no changes which is the behaviour that I find most useful. I fully support the comments to revert it back or have the option of having a save button like it was. The greying out was one of the best things about LO and the lack of it is one of the most frustrating things when I have to use Word.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention that I am using openSUSE 42.1 and I updated LO to 5.2 after reading on the bug site that this issue would be addressed by the 5.2 release. Sadly it wasn’t really addressed. I now have a different star over the save icon. On saving the star disappears and reappears when anything is changed. Can we please just go back to the greyed out icon and stop pandering to the few people who actually use Google Drive (apparently the 'Remote Server" is Google Drive only)
I concur completely!
I agree the ‘save’ Icon worked better before
Instead of opening up a new question, I would like to bump this one:
So, this is an old topic, but have there been any changes? I don’t really bother about the layout of the save button, but in Calc as opposed to Writer, the save button does not reflect the current status of the document (changed or not). As in Writer, I would like the star to be removed when I undo all changes I made after saving the document. Does the “simple save button” behaves in this way? How can I add it to the toolbar? Thanks.
Agreed, I seldom use the mouse to save, but use the Ctrl S constantly. For large spreadsheets this consumes a significant amount of time, so I look at the status or rather I used to look at the status to see if I needed to save or not.
sometimes interruptions happen, and when I get back to the computer I glance at the save icon to see if I saved when I left the office or not. Now it lies to me and always appears to need saving.
I also agree. I MUCH prefer the old save button (often I have several documents open for reference), and wish not only would LO restore it, but that other software packages would implement it as well!
So we can look for the nearly invisible little star to see if changes were made OR, (I just discovered this) we can look in the status line at the bottom of the window for a tiny little icon of a page with a red dot. The red dot is not there if the document has experienced no changes.
I see I’m really Johnny-come-lately to this one! I just upgraded from OO3 to LO6. While I love many of the new features, this one is the pits. I use the File menu for saving, printing, opening, etc. It’s just really handier for me for most everything it contains. I totally dislike that File>Save is no longer grayed-out for unchanged documents. Yes, there is that tiny red icon in the status bar, and the red dot on the Save icon in the toolbar, but you know what? They don’t work! They show “changes” when I have NOT made a change! If I open a file and just look around without doing anything else, it gets “marked” and I am prompted for a “Save” when I attempt to close the file! This is a real nuisance, and I am continually confused as to whether I have effected any real alterations and what they might be.
Bring back some intelligence to this function, and gray-out the Save feature when there really is no change! I also very much like the GIMP function, where the filename in the title bar gets an asterisk (*) when a change occurs. This is really visible and unambiguous.
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Has an ‘old save button’ option been added yet?
I wasn’t able to find one, so I’m guessing not?
There needs to be an option added so that it won’t let the file be saved if no changes have been made, with a grey disk logo to signify this. The whole point of software is to offer options and automate the chosen ones.