How do I disable OneDrive in Office 365?
Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom.
Here for AskLeo.com. Here's the question I got.
I recently started using MS 365 and am confused by OneDrive.
Keeping digital storage organized is
already a problem for me with Google One, Google Workspace and Evernote Accounts,
and I don't understand the value of having yet another cloud storage system.
It's no longer an automatic process for me
to save documents and spreadsheets, and I find that documents are saved
automatically before I've had a chance to or understand how or where to name them.
Yeah, I agree.
Microsoft has, in my opinion, really bungled OneDrive.
And I don't mean that from a technological point of view,
although there are definitely some feature decisions that they made that I really
disagree with, that I think have contributed to the confusion.
But the way that they're pushing it, the way that they've got it enabled
everywhere by default, the way that they are encouraging you
to use in OneDrive actually kind of crosses the line.
It feels like they're ramming it down your throat.
The good news here is that while
the defaults probably have things set so that you're using it even though you don't
necessarily want to, it's actually relatively easy to turn off.
You just have to go poke in a couple of different places.
Let me show you exactly where you need to poke.
So here we are in Windows 11.
This first step is optional,
but I want to point it out because I think it actually clears up a number
of the things that people run into from time to time.
I've clicked on Start or right clicked on Start, I've clicked on Settings.
And we're going over here to Apps.
In apps, we've got installed apps.
I'll make this a little bit bigger so you
can see the long list of things that I have installed on this one.
And right here you can see that there is
this thing called, of all things, Microsoft OneDrive.
You can, if you like,
click on the Ellipses over here and then click on Uninstall.
Now I'm not going to do that because I want OneDrive on this machine.
But what this will do is this will remove
the connection between your machine and your OneDrive account online.
It will not delete any files in either location.
It will simply disconnect the two.
What that means is any changes you make
to files in your OneDrive folder which will still be on your computer will
not automatically be reflected online or on other computers that you might happen
to be using the same OneDrive account with.
But the bottom line here is that for this computer, once you uninstall OneDrive,
you're no longer having things get automatically uploaded to the cloud.
You're no longer having things
automatically show up on your machine because they got added to the cloud.
This is how you disconnect the two.
Later, if you decide you want to use OneDrive, you can certainly reinstall it.
It'll be in the Microsoft store?
But for the most part people who don't
want to use OneDrive typically don't want to use OneDrive.
And I do recommend that if you're that kind of person,
uninstall the app to avoid confusion in the future so that you won't have some
magical things happen that you weren't expecting.
But like I said, I'm going to leave it here because it is optional.
We don't need to do it.
To actually clear up the issues you're having with Microsoft Office
in this case then we're going to go ahead and click on I'll choose Word.
I'll describe what it means for the other applications here in a moment.
In Word, in the lower left hand, you'll see this thing called options.
That's where we want to go.
In Options under Save are the settings we care about.
Auto save files in the cloud by default.
I'm suspecting you want to turn that off.
Don't show the backstage is basically
I think it's their splash screen that describes you're using Microsoft Word.
It's up to you if you want that or not.
Show additional places for saving, even if a signin may be required.
No, I don't want additional places.
That's the whole point.
We want it just to be on our computer.
Oh, save to computer by default.
That's probably what you're looking for.
That will cause Word to not try and do things with OneDrive.
It will save it on your computer,
which is where I suspect you're expecting things to be saved.
The default file location, that's up to you.
It truly is.
What you're seeing here, cuzername documents is the old default.
That's probably where you want things to happen.
But if you want to use a different folder,
by all means use a different folder anywhere on your machine.
This is especially useful if you have an external hard drive or you've got
a second hard drive in your machine that you keep all your work on.
You can now set the default location to be a folder on that other drive.
And if you take a look actually at the companion article for this video,
you'll see that the screenshots that I have there are exactly that.
They were made with my primary machine.
And indeed I have a second,
actually a third internal hard drive and that's where I keep my documents.
If you have been using OneDrive it is
possible that you will see something called Users username OneDrive documents.
That's a side effect of OneDrive's backup process.
You can continue to use that if you want.
It's totally up to you.
Since you've disconnected OneDrive
by uninstalling the app then it's just another folder on your machine.
But since it does tend to confuse people,
I kind of recommend that you do go ahead and reset your default location to your
normal Documents directory in your user folder.
Once we hit OK, that's pretty much it.
We've now decoupled Word from trying to use online services,
trying to use OneDrive, trying to put files in a OneDrive folder.
It's now going to put things on your computer where you specified.
Now I do have to be clear.
The default location is for new files and folders.
If you've got existing documents you're
going to want to reopen them and then save as to save them to the location you want
or just recognize that they're in this other folder wherever they happen to be.
But the bottom line is now the default is to operate only on your computer.
Now I do have to point out that even though we've made this change to Word,
if we now go to some of the other Office applications and in this case I've fired
up Excel, I'm going to go to its options and to its save set of options.
And you'll see that not everything we wanted to be changed was reflected here.
So again I'm going to have to go and uncheck the autosave.
I'm going to show additional or not show additional places.
That's what we unchecked.
And the other one we're going to save
to the computer by default and the location is the one we want.
But you can see this autosave for whatever reason it was also still reset.
My advice is that you double check once you make this change,
you take the time to double check this same setting in all
of the Microsoft Office applications that you actually use.
If you just use Word in Excel that's great.
If you use Word and PowerPoint check PowerPoint.
If you use Word and Visio.
Check Word and Visio.
You get the idea.
The bottom line here is that unfortunately changing these settings in one
of the Microsoft Office applications does not necessarily change it in the others.
And even if it does, that could change someday.
It's the kind of a thing that I could see Microsoft changing out from underneath us.
So just double check the settings
in the various Office applications that you use to make sure that they're
actually set the way you want them to be set.
Bottom line here, honestly, my advice, if I were forced to give advice,
I would actually encourage you to learn how to use OneDrive.
It's a nifty thing, it really is.
Especially if you've got Microsoft Office.
You've got a terabyte of cloud storage
that's useful for backing up, for sharing, for doing all sorts of interesting things.
But I totally get that you may not be interested in cloud storage.
You may be totally baffled by Microsoft's positioning of this thing.
I totally understand that as well.
In which case, yes, uninstalling the one drive app from your
machine and double checking the settings in Office are the way to go to basically
make your life simpler and much more along the lines of what you've been expecting.
I hope that's helpful for comments, for,
for updates, for related links and more visit AskLeo.com/149571. I'm
Leo Notenboom. This is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.