One owl's personal battle against irritating Excel and Word defaults

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One owl's personal battle against irritating Excel and Word defaults
Do you hate OneDrive as much as I do? I doubt it. How about those extra dialog boxes which appear in Excel, Word and PowerPoint whenever you want to open or save a file, called Backstage view? This blog gives some welcome ideas for reducing the intrusion of unsolicited OneDrive dialog boxes into your working life.

Posted by Andy Brown on 30 January 2024

In this blog

Turning off backstage view
Switching AutoSave from OneDrive

If you're the sort of person who loves OneDrive and uses it for all your storage, this blog probably isn't for you. But if you're the sort of maverick who wants to be able to choose to turn off unsolicited intrusive dialog boxes in Excel, Word and PowerPoint ... read on!

Note that this blog is only relevant if you are a 365 subscriber and are using the desktop version of MS Office applications. So if you use Excel 365 in the cloud, or don't have a 365 subscription and have bought a standalone desktop version of Office, then the tips in this blog won't apply to you.

Turning off backstage view

So let's say I press Ctrl + O or Ctrl + S to open or save a file in Excel. I'll see dialog boxes like this:

The right-hand dialog box for saving a file is particularly annoying, as I never share anything to OneDrive; and yet I have to click on More options... every time to avoid it.

So it turns out that these extra dialog boxes are called backstage view, and can be turned off (separately for each 365 desktop application). To do this, first select to show your options in Excel, Word or PowerPoint:

Choose this option from the bottom of the File menu.

Now tick this box in the Save tab of the dialog box:

You're choosing not to show backstage view.

Here's what I now see if I pressCtrl + O or Ctrl + S to open or save a file in Excel:

Back to the gold old days!

I wish I'd known about this years ago! All those extra clicks to reject the default suggestion to use OneDrive and to find the hidden options to use my trusty laptop's hard disk or server's shared drive instead: wasted!

Switching AutoSave from OneDrive

This is a particular bugbear in Word. I work on locally stored documents, and would like Word to save my work every couple of minutes to ensure that I don't lose anything if my computer fails (or I accidentally close down my file). However, it appears that this is not possible now:

Advice from 2019 from this Microsoft forum.

Advice further down the page explains that (apparently) autosave to your local drive has never been available (I'm sure I remember this feature!):

Advice from an Office MVP (Microsoft Valued Professional) further down the same page.

So it looks like your best option is to turn AutoSave off and rely on AutoRecover (and save your work manually if you want to ensure that you don't lose something):

Choose this option in the quick access toolbar to turn off autosave.

If you want to back up Word documents automatically you could use this add-in from Graham Mayor ("helping to ease the lives of Microsoft Word users"). I should stress that Wise Owl don't endorse this, and haven't tried it!

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