In desktop Office and Office 365, if you’re signed in with your Microsoft account, by default it will try to save the file to your OneDrive account. This is a new feature that dates back to Office 2013 and is designed to help you move documents to the cloud so you can access them from anywhere and make backups more secure.
I think this is a great feature, but I’m not very happy that Microsoft saves all files to OneDrive by default! Personally, I don’t want to save most of my documents in the cloud, and I hate to constantly click on this computer to save my Office file locally.
Fortunately, there is an option you can change to have Office save files locally by default, and you can always manually save the file to your OneDrive account if you want. Here’s how to do it.
Save MS Office files locally
First, open any Office program like Word. Then click on “File” and “Options”.
Now go ahead and click “Save” in the left pane and then check the “Save to computer as default” box.
You can also change the default local file location, if you like, in the box below the checkbox. Now, when you go to save the file, it will save it locally and not in your OneDrive account.
One nice thing about Office is that when you make this change, for example in Word, it automatically changes the default save location in all other Office programs such as Excel and PowerPoint, so you don’t have to change the if for each individual user. statement. Enjoy!
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