The dreaded disappearing document is finally almost truly a thing of the past for Microsoft Word users. And it’s about time!
If you’re still saving your documents locally, then you know the drill: you work for hours on a document or presentation, and then suddenly you’re stuck. The words you’re typing aren’t showing up, the cursor isn’t moving right, or the window crashes out entirely. And instantly, panic ensues: how long has it been since I hit “save”? Is my entire report lost forever?
Thankfully, this happens less than it used to. Microsoft has already made some decent progress in this area, and hopefully you already have some sort of autosave set up. But it still happens often enough to be the stuff of nightmares, and Microsoft’s finally doing something about it.
The Status Quo Is a Mess
Currently, Word users have all kinds of options on how and where to save their files. You can save them to your local hard drive, to the network, to external storage, to OneDrive, or to a third-party cloud storage service.
Choice is good, but the problem is that files don’t behave the same way across all those destinations. Some locations autosave every few minutes (hopefully); others save every keystroke. Some don’t update at all until you manually hit “save.”
In short: the status quo is a mess. Maybe it works well for you; maybe it doesn’t. But there are too many edge case and too many documents going poof.
What’s Changing: OneDrive Cloud Storage as Default
Starting soon, new Word documents will automatically be saved to your OneDrive cloud storage account by default. This has been an option for a while and is something Microsoft even pushed pretty hard around a decade or so ago, but now it’s becoming the default for all Microsoft 365 users.
In essence, Microsoft is moving toward the way Google has handled its Docs storage since the start. If you’ve ever used Google Docs for anything, then you have a pretty good idea how this works. When a file is saved to cloud storage, it’s not stored locally on your computer. It’s on the provider’s servers, available on any device at any time. Because of this change, files automatically save constantly (because every few characters you type is getting uploaded to that cloud server anyway).
The difference between Microsoft and Google is, of course, you still get the powerful desktop Microsoft Word experience. The file just lives somewhere else.
Configured Properly, You Won’t Notice a Thing
Cloud storage can be confusing, and this is probably why Microsoft’s last attempt at making it the default didn’t go so well. But here’s the thing: if it’s set up properly, you’ll hardly notice anything is different. It’s possible to set up OneDrive so that the folders you know and love, like Documents, still look and act the same way. They show up in File Explorer just like they did before, you can save files to them or drag and drop files to move them around. The only difference is that now those folders aren’t technically on your computer — they point to cloud locations instead.
Privacy Concerns? You Can Turn This Off
We know some customers may be worried about privacy concerns. Hosting all your files on Microsoft’s servers does sound risky. But consider that thousands of companies use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 in this exact same way already; these companies have some of the best security on the planet and can generally be trusted.
If you prefer to keep files stored locally, you’ll be able to turn off this change in settings. But for most small businesses, there’s very little downside to moving to OneDrive — and tons of upside.
Got questions about configuring this the right way? We can help. Reach out anytime.