Saving and Finding a Word Document.

Question

I used to be able to save a document I am working on in a separate folder called Documents. This would appear in a box with other folders such as Recent and Desktop. Now all of a sudden these folders have disappeared, and all I get are “Online Locations” and “Tags”. I am working on a Mac. It’s very important for me to easily save and find documents, and it was working fine up to a day or two. Now the box with all the folders has changed completely and I can’t find anything.

Answer 1

When you use File>Save As, do you see an On My Mac button in the dialog? Click on that to save to your local hard disk.

Answer 2

Since you also mentioned finding: There are several available features which include:

• File< Open Recent & File> Open Recent> More... in the main menu
• The Search field in the File> Open dialog or any Finder window
• The macOS Spotlight feature

Note that using the Finder search field provides for using a variety of criteria including Name, Content, You can learn more about it & Spotlight by going to Help> Mac User Guide in the Finder menu bar.

Answer 3

The save dialog in Word for Mac has switched to showing only online locations (OneDrive/SharePoint) and tags. To get back to saving and finding files in local folders like Documents:

1. In Word for Mac, open the document and choose File > Save As (or press ⌘ + Shift + S).
2. In the Save As dialog, if it is showing an online service, click On My Mac. This switches the view from “Online Locations” to local folders.
3. Once in On My Mac, navigate to the Documents folder and save the file there.
4. Next time you use Save As, if it shows a local folder instead of online services, you can switch back to online by selecting Online Locations; if it shows online, select On My Mac again to get your folders.

To save directly to a different local folder (like Documents) when using Save:

1. Use File > Save As instead of just Save when you want to change folder or filename.
2. In the Save As dialog, navigate to Documents or any other folder on your Mac, type the file name, and select Save.

If Word is defaulting to cloud locations (OneDrive/SharePoint) and you prefer local storage, always switch to On My Mac in the Save As dialog before saving. That restores the classic folder list (Documents, Desktop, etc.) so files can be easily saved and found on the Mac.

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References:

• Save a file in Office for Mac
• Save, back up, and recover a file in Microsoft Office
• Customize the save experience in Office
• Save Office files to your favorite folder