> The cloud has it's place but I've never been happy with the underhanded way that Office 365 "encourages" users to save to the cloud.
What does it do?
I use it on my Mac and nearly all my documents are just local, except for a few I've specifically saved to the could so I can easily access them from other devices.
When I make a new document and save it, it defaults to the save it locally dialog. I don't notice any encouragement, let alone underhanded encouragement, to save to the cloud.
It is possible that when I first installed it the default was to give the save online dialog when saving a new document instead of the save local dialog, but it seems to remember which one you last used and give that as the default the next time.
Have I missed some other encouragement to use the cloud?
My experience on Windows is that it selects your Onedrive account automatically. I've had to change the default because it kept trying to upload my documents.
I've also had several scratch documents appear in a cloud drive at some point, probably through autosaves. Disabling cloud integrations tends to generate nag screens or "helpful" warning toolbars to "restore functionality". Going offline in Office on Windows is a path riddled with deceptive design. This is the education version of Office on Windows 11, though I haven't used or updated it in a while; not that I think Microsoft's data collection team has suddenly had a change of heart.
Non-enterprise versions of the product don't seem to be available without signing in to a Microsoft account at all. You can log yourself out out after activation, but realistically very few people know about that and even then you've already given Windows a hint of a Microsoft account, which it will use to try to sign you into every chance it gets.
It defaults to onedrive and buries local storage behind a tiny text button. It brings up a giant popup saying 'you need to upload to edit' if you open a form in read only mode and various other ways.
What does it do?
I use it on my Mac and nearly all my documents are just local, except for a few I've specifically saved to the could so I can easily access them from other devices.
When I make a new document and save it, it defaults to the save it locally dialog. I don't notice any encouragement, let alone underhanded encouragement, to save to the cloud.
It is possible that when I first installed it the default was to give the save online dialog when saving a new document instead of the save local dialog, but it seems to remember which one you last used and give that as the default the next time.
Have I missed some other encouragement to use the cloud?