How to Convince Microsoft Office Apps to Save Files on Your Mac

By default, Microsoft Office apps—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—try to save files on Microsoft OneDrive as a way of promoting the company’s cloud storage. If that’s undesirable, you can easily keep your files locally on your Mac or in a different cloud storage location. In the Save dialog, click the On My Mac button to switch to a standard Save dialog showing all your other storage options. There’s no way to set On My Mac as the default location, but the Save dialog automatically remembers your last saved location. That should be sufficient most of the time, although it’s not unheard of for an Office update to flip the Save dialog back to OneDrive.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/pzAxe)


Social Media: Microsoft Office apps save documents in the cloud-based OneDrive by default, but you can easily switch to saving files elsewhere. The apps generally remember your change but may forget after an update.