Local storage instead of One Drive on a MAC

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Community Support and for sharing your concerns about OneDrive. I completely understand your viewpoint—if OneDrive had been a mandatory component of the Home Office 2024 suite on your Mac, that certainly would have influenced your decision. I'm happy to clarify how you can work with local storage exclusively.

Your Office 2024 Experience: While OneDrive is integrated into Microsoft Office to offer seamless cloud backup and collaboration, its use is completely optional. You retain full control over where your files are saved. Office applications on a Mac allow you to choose local storage—often listed as “On My Mac”—when you save your documents, spreadsheets, or presentations.

Quick Steps to Save Locally:

1. When Saving a New File:
   • Open your document in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
   • Click File > Save As.
   • In the save dialog, look for the sidebar or dropdown options and select On My Mac (or any other local folder of your choice).
   • Save your file as you normally would.
2. Changing the Default Save Location:
   • In some Office applications, you might find preferences under Word > Preferences (or the equivalent in Excel/PowerPoint).
   • Look for a setting related to “Default save location” and set it to a folder on your local hard drive.
   • This will prompt the application to default to local folders rather than OneDrive when you create new files.
3. Unlink OneDrive from your computer:
   • Click the OneDrive cloud icon up in your Menu bar, click Help & Settings  to open the menu, and select Preferences.
   • Go to the Account tab.
   • Select Unlink this Mac.
     In the support article you can you find more information about it: Turn off, disable, or uninstall OneDrive - Microsoft Support

Additional Insights: Microsoft includes OneDrive to provide the benefits of real-time collaboration and cloud backup, but it certainly isn’t required for local work. If you decide later that you’d like the extra security of cloud backups, you can always enable OneDrive with a few simple steps. Until then, you can confidently save and manage all your documents locally.

Please note that as a Microsoft Community Support agent, I work within the community forums and do not have access to the advanced configuration tools available to Microsoft Support. However, I hope these steps help you set up your Mac just the way you want it.

Thank you again for your feedback. If you have any further questions or need additional assistance with your Office 2024 setup, please feel free to let me know.

Best regards,

Scott_LA | Microsoft Community Support.