How To Change The Default Save Location In Office Word & Excel

The recent versions of the Microsoft Office Word program encourage users to save documents to their OneDrive account so that the documents can be accessed from other devices.

While saving documents to OneDrive has its benefits, many users prefer saving documents right on their computers for various reasons.

If you prefer saving your Office Word or Excel documents on your PC instead of your OneDrive account, you might want to set the Documents, Desktop, or any other location on your PC as the default save location instead of OneDrive.

Luckily, you can easily change the default save location in the Office Word and Excel programs. Follow the directions below to change the default save location in Office Word.

Change the default save location in Office Word/Excel on Windows PCs

NOTE 1: Please note that changing the default save location in the Word program also changes the default save location in other Office applications such as Excel and PowerPoint.

NOTE 2: This method works only for Microsoft Office applications installed on Windows PCs only.

Step 1: Open the Word program using search or any other method.

Step 2: Click the File menu and then click Options to open the Word Options dialog. If you cannot see Options, refer to our Options missing in Office Word guide.

Step 3: Here, on the left side, click the Save tab.

Step 4: On the right side, select the check box labelled Save to computer by default, and then click the Browse button to select the folder where you would like to save Word files by default. Select a folder and then click the OK button.

Click the OK button to apply changes. That’s it! From now onwards, when you try to save a Word or Excel document, the Word program will select the new default location.

Change the default save location in Office Word and Excel on Macs

The current version of Office 365 for Mac does not offer an option to change the default location. However, it remembers the last used location. So, you can save a Word/Excel file to a location of choice on your Mac, which the Word/Excel program will also use as the default location for future files.