How to Make Microsoft Office Save Files Directly to Your Computer (Instead of OneDrive)
If you’re using a set of Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you’ll notice that these applications try to save all of your files to OneDrive. For some people, this is a great system because it keeps an online copy of their file in the cloud. But if you prefer to keep local copies of Office files, or use alternative cloud storage services like Google Drive, you should force Office to save files on your computer.
Unfortunately, Microsoft bundled the very useful autosave feature with OneDrive. If you start saving your files outside of OneDrive, you’ll have to manually save your documents again. This is inconvenient and forces you to return to the age-old habit of compulsively pressing Ctrl + S again and again. For this reason, OneDrive is probably best for most people.
If this is not an option, you can change the default save location for all Microsoft Office files to a different location. To do this, open the Office application that you use the most. Open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and choose File > Options to open the preferences.
In the left pane of Microsoft Word preferences, click Save . In the right pane, under Save Documents , enable Save to Computer by Default . Below that, click the Browse button next to Default File Save Folder and select the folder where you want to save Word files by default. When you’re done, click ” OK ” and restart Microsoft Word to start saving files on your computer by default.
Now that you live without the ability to automatically save every minor change, you need to make sure that the automatic restore feature is set up correctly. AutoRecover kicks in when Word crashes unexpectedly and lets you restore the most recent version of a document if you haven’t saved it in a while. AutoRecovery is set to save a copy of your document every 10 minutes. You should reduce this time to 1 minute to minimize the chance of losing important data.
To do this in Microsoft Word, choose File > Options and click the Save tab on the left. Then, in the right pane, check the box next to Keep AutoRecover information on every file . Change the value from 10 to 1 and you’re done.