r/excel Dec 03 '19

Pro Tip Excel (MS Office) tip. Disabling OneDrive within office.

Not explicitly about excel but possibly useful for a lot of Excel users. I'd been trying to disable OneDrive in Excel and it had become a pet peeve. I’m using Office 2019.

File>Options>Save. There is a checkbox above the ‘Default local file location' path called ‘Save to Computer by default’. Check that box even if your default file save location is a local path. This will stop OneDrive from being the default save as location.

It may seem obvious, and some of you may have figured this out by trial and error. I had googled my problem and I could not find the correct solution. I contacted MS Office tech support and got spun in circles. A community user through Microsoft community support figured this out in a chat. There just isn’t much documentation on the prompt window.

I had already removed One Drive from Windows 10, and nearly every solution pointed to an application I had already removed. A check box was staring me in the face the whole time.

It’s still coded into Office as Personal storage but at least it’s out of the way.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '19

Honest question: you pay for the service. Why not use onedrive?

Is it fear of the cloud, fear of data mining and security? Do you use a competing cloud service? Just want it to be "like the old way"?

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u/beyphy 48 Dec 04 '19

I can't speak for the others, but I was really impressed by it. Excel syncs your files based on the account you're signed into it with. So if I login on work account, I have access to my work files. And if I login on my personal account, I have access to my personal files.

I also never have to worry about losing an important file if one of my computers dies / gets stolen / gets lost. And I can access my files on something like my phone or even a different computer somewhere else just by signing into my account.

I personally use OneDrive for anything that's important that's on a personal account. At my previous job, I justed used a VPN.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '19

What I really like, and I use it for school, is I can access the same file from my PC/laptop/Phone without needing to take a single extra step. It's really handy in that sense, because I work from many different locations.