I don't want OneDrive at home

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At home I am running W7 (for now), and recently replaced Office 13 with 365. So far so good, generally, except that I am not interested in the cloud; I’m happy to have my docs on my machine and have my own backups.

For various reasons, at work last week, where Office 365 rules, I got a OneDrive account and had to back up my workstation’s files and folders. Today, at home, after creating a new Word doc, the save default went to OneDrive, and word showed me as signed into my office account! I hate this invasion!

In Word Options/Save, I unchecked the OneDrive boxes, but to no effect. They don’t show up now but that appears to make no difference. I looked up the issue and went to control panel to uninstall OD, where I was “told” that OD had already been uninstalled, and would I like to remove the icon from the programs list, which I did. I rebooted.

Opening a new Word document and saving, OD saving options appeared as before — two, both with my work account but one with the OD icon and one with a green Sites one — though the save default location has returned to my home desktop.

Am I doomed to this brave new Gatesian-Huxleyian fate, or is there a way out?

Thanks.

 

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Well, this is because MS Office applications no longer depend on the OneDrive application to access OneDrive / SharePoint content.

There’s an option hidden somewhere with the privacy settings where you can tell Office applications to not use “helpful network functions”. With that you can supposedly block the direct OneDrive / SharePoint access.

And last time I used it, it got reset to allow a couple of Click-to-Run updates later when the options dialog was rearranged…

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BigBadSteve

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[BigBadSteve]

mn– wrote:

Well, this is because MS Office applications no longer depend on the OneDrive application to access OneDrive / SharePoint content. There’s an option hidden somewhere with the privacy settings where you can tell Office applications to not use “helpful network functions”. With that you can supposedly block the direct OneDrive / SharePoint access. And last time I used it, it got reset to allow a couple of Click-to-Run updates later when the options dialog was rearranged…

File->[scroll down]->Options->Trust Center->Privacy Options->Privacy Settings->[scroll down]->untick ‘Enable connected experiences‘

Doing this turns off some features of Office as described on the last settings window above, probably features you don’t use anyway.

The above is in Office 2016. Office 365  settings will be the same.

Asus N53SM & N53SN 64-bit laptops (Win7 Pro & Win10 Pro 64-bit multiboots), venerable HP Pavilion t760 32-bit desktop (XP & Win7 Pro multiboot), Oracle VirtualBox VM's: XP & Win7 32-bit, XP Mode, aged Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2019s (8" & 10.1"), Blu-ray burners, digital cameras, ext. HDDs (latest 5TB!), AnyDVD, Easeus ToDo Backup Home, Waterfox, more. Me: Aussie card-carrying Windows geek.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by BigBadSteve.

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Thanks. I’ll check further.

I did discover that I could sign out, up in the title bar and to the right where it indicated I was signed in. The sign-out link is very small, but it did remove the OD save options from appearing.

A note to others: you have to also go into Options for each Office application and uncheck the Save to OD box in the Save page.

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In doing a Win7 rebuild nearly 2 years ago, I was able to reinstall Office2013 without OneDrive using @AlexEiffel’s Installing a customized click-to-run Office 2013-2016 as a baseline, with #150645 being very useful in reducing OneDrive’s impact.

This does involve using Microsoft’s Office Deployment Tool, rather than software discs.

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You should have stayed with Office 2013. Office 2013 can be configured to be completely “local”, unlike Office 365, which is mainly “online”.

If you are using your work account to log on to Office 365 from home, then your work stuff will show up at home. On the other hand, if you are using your own personal Microsoft account to log into Office 365 from home, then your work stuff won’t show up at home.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Why don’t you uninstall MS Office and download (for free) and install Libre Office instead?
I’ve been using it for years now, and it’s constantly being improved.
It works very well for me, has the same or better features than MS Office.
Also there is “Open Office”, which is developed, I think, under the umbrella of Oracle corp.
Why does everything has to be MS this or MS that?
Why is MS so h***bent on taking us to “the cloud”?
Are they “filtering” all that data that is uploaded to the servers in order to make earnings?
Where is “One Drive”?
How safe is the data on these servers???? – can they be hacked?
I have a thousand more questions on hand –

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anonymous wrote:

… download (for free) and install Libre Office instead?
I’ve been using it for years now, …

Depending on specifics this may or may not be an option. There are certain components of the respective suites where there’s very little feature overlap between MS Office and LibreOffice.

MS Access / LibreOffice Base in particular. Also MS Outlook…

(Heh. Been using various versions of it myself too for a couple of decades, starting with StarOffice 4.2…)

anonymous wrote:

Also there is “Open Office”, which is developed, I think, under the umbrella of Oracle corp.

Oracle hasn’t been involved since 2011. It’s at Apache Software Foundation now, and appears to have much less developer activity compared to LibreOffice.

anonymous wrote:

Why does everything has to be MS this or MS that?

In my opinion, usually doesn’t have to… but then again…

anonymous wrote:

Why is MS so h***bent on taking us to “the cloud”?
Are they “filtering” all that data that is uploaded to the servers in order to make earnings?
Where is “One Drive”?
How safe is the data on these servers???? – can they be hacked?
I have a thousand more questions on hand –

Right, given your word choices I’d expect you probably wouldn’t trust Microsoft’s answers to those, and no one else is going to be able to verify whatever is said.

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mn– wrote:

Well, this is because MS Office applications no longer depend on the OneDrive application to access OneDrive / SharePoint content.

There’s an option hidden somewhere with the privacy settings where you can tell Office applications to not use “helpful network functions”. With that you can supposedly block the direct OneDrive / SharePoint access.

And last time I used it, it got reset to allow a couple of Click-to-Run updates later when the options dialog was rearranged…

I never realised that I didn’t need the Onedrive application on my laptop to upload Microsoft word documents to my Onedrive cloud account.

I just tried it, I disabled the Onedrive app on my laptop, looked in the “save” options in my word document, and sure enough, managed to upload to my Onedrive cloud account.

Do you know (or does anyone else know) when this option was introduced? |I’m generally interested. It must be new, possibly sometime this year maybe with a windows or office update? Any answer would be appreciated.

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Mophead wrote:

Do you know (or does anyone else know) when this option was introduced? |I’m generally interested. It must be new, possibly sometime this year maybe with a windows or office update? Any answer would be appreciated.

Actually the ability is significantly older, it’s just that the tools to use it have changed several times and you had to specifically turn this feature on if you wanted to use it… until recently.

When exactly, depends… apparently some Office 365 tenants won’t get the latest of these changes for months yet while some already have them. Gradual roll-out by Microsoft, see…

Mophead wrote:

I never realised that I didn’t need the Onedrive application on my laptop to upload Microsoft word documents to my Onedrive cloud account.

You’ve always had the option of just using a web browser instead, I believe. And then there are also other client applications, such as Rclone.

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Mophead

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[Al Taylor]

FWIW, some degree of control over saving to OneDrive is offered in the “Professional” versions of Windows 10 and Window 8.1 (but not in Windows 7 Professional).

In the Group Policy Editor is an entry titled “Save documents to OneDrive by default”, which can be disabled or enabled.

It can be found here: Run -> gpedit.msc
Navigate to “Local Computer Policy\Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\OneDrive”. Under “Settings” you will find “Save documents to OneDrive by default”

Disable or Enable it as desired.  Then open a Command Prompt and run gpupdate /force.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Al Taylor. Reason: typo
• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Al Taylor.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Kirsty.

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Mophead

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[Mophead]

mn– wrote:

Mophead wrote:

Do you know (or does anyone else know) when this option was introduced? |I’m generally interested. It must be new, possibly sometime this year maybe with a windows or office update? Any answer would be appreciated.

Actually the ability is significantly older, it’s just that the tools to use it have changed several times and you had to specifically turn this feature on if you wanted to use it… until recently.

When exactly, depends… apparently some Office 365 tenants won’t get the latest of these changes for months yet while some already have them. Gradual roll-out by Microsoft, see…

Mophead wrote:

I never realised that I didn’t need the Onedrive application on my laptop to upload Microsoft word documents to my Onedrive cloud account.

You’ve always had the option of just using a web browser instead, I believe. And then there are also other client applications, such as Rclone.

I use Microsoft Office Home & Business 2016 on my laptop which is local as opposed to office 365 which is mainly online and what I did was click “save as” in my word document on the laptop and then choose my onedrive personal account. It’s that simple. The Onedrive app isn’t needed on the laptop.

Obviously as you say, the tools have changed to make it simpler as I had never noticed it before. Must have been buried deep in the options previously to turn the feature on until now.

I can only assume this new feature is probably just a few months old if it’s still rolling out to all users?

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Mophead.

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