I recently used the Office 365 Word application after about a year. Microsoft has made several small changes to Office 365 over the past year, and it’s better than ever in most ways.
However, when you try to save a document, Microsoft Office shows the following dialog where your OneDrive account is selected by default. That is, OneDrive is the default document saving location. Although the dialog offers you to choose a location on your PC (offline location), it doesn’t allow you to set an offline location as default.
It’s true that many users prefer to save their documents to the OneDrive these days, not all users want to save documents to the cloud storage. Saving your documents to OneDrive has its own perks, but most prefer to save documents offline.
If you always save your documents on your PC, you might want to set a location on your PC as the default save location in Microsoft Office 365 applications.
Luckily, Microsoft Office settings offer a provision to set a folder on your PC as the default location. It can be your Documents, Desktop, or any other folder on your PC. Here is how to do that.
Change Office 365 Word, Excel, & PowerPoint default save location
Step 1: Open the Office application where you want to change the default save location. Please note that you will need to do this for all applications if you want to set a local folder as the default location for all applications. We are using Word as an example in this guide, but you can do this for any Office application.
Step 2: Click the File menu and then click Options.
Step 3: Switch to the Save tab. In the Save documents section, select the check box next to the Save to Computer by default option. Under that option, there is a field and a Browse button to choose a location. Select a location which you would like to set as the default save location and then click the OK button to change the default saving location in Office 365.
How to repair the Office 365 installation in Windows 10 guide might also interest you.
Robert Manning says
Notice in the example above, the first box checked is “AUTO SAVE ONE DRIVE…by default…”
This box has to be unchecked!
Alice Anderson says
didn’t work for me either
Joe says
Thanks been going crazy with this
Liz says
When I go to home on Word or Excel I am not given an ‘Options’ tab as described above – what do I do?
Eric says
Any way to get it to ALWAYS default to the SAME folder as the original file that you are saving as from ?
stingrr44 says
When I go to the Save box under Options, everything is grey and when I set Save to Computer by Default, set the location, and click OK nothing changes. It still saves to OneDrive by default.
Ocha says
i have followed all your instructions, but my it still not change. it still saved on onedrive, what should i do?
e popa says
thanks a lot, this was driving me mad…
Dave says
Thanks admin, Excellent and well needed by me. The standard dialogue box was driving me crazy! Great article, kept it simple.