I get so annoyed with Microsoft Word and Excel these days with their online this and their online that and their let me do all these fancy things for you that you don’t really want. Damn! It has ticked me off too many times to count.
For the last decade, probably, I have fought with the Open or Save dialog in Office. Ever since Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to ‘help’ me by offering me more choices of where to open and save things, I have struggled to keep my files where I want them. For a while, I did use their suggestions to save things in OneDrive but the more I used it the more I hated all of the automation and suggestions. I got files mixed up and had multiple copies online and on my computer. This probably goes for other MS Office products that I don’t use, too.
Anyway, to the point of this post, I wanted a cleaner interface for Open and Save that only saved to one place by default, my computer. If I want to put it in my OneDrive folder on my computer, that is my choice. I don’t like things that save to places like https://d.docs.live.net/5a56871b86005abc. That just gets my goat.
I found a way to disable this craziness. It probably comes from some lawsuit-threat pushback over the years from someone somewhere, but there are settings under Options -> General called Privacy Settings that will let you turn this crap off.
I turned all three of these off and the online lunacy seems to have stopped. I turned off
Experiences that analyze your content,
Experiences that download online content, and
All Connected Experiences.
The last option is what removed the excessive online options called Shared with Me and OneDrive in the Open and Save dialog that drove me crazy.
Before
After
I hope this helps someone keep their sanity. I know that many of the features that have been added to Office over the years are not really for the benefit of the user but to benefit Microsoft with their tracking and control of users. The same thing has happened to Windows. What was once a great OS has gone the way of the big corporation that needs to keep its thumb on you in order to control you and sell you as a product. But hey, that’s for another post.