We can declare with certainty that saving a document to your hard drive does not need a lot of work based on our years of expertise with Microsoft Office. Indeed, Microsoft has made this easier over time, even adding new options. However, the output is may not always be of preference, and users may find themselves with files not in the places they want them to be. In this blog, I will show you how to set a default save location in Word for Mac. Follow through for more information on how to achieve this.
Step by step guide – How to set a default save location in Word for Mac
- Firstly, Open your Word document.
- After that click on “File”.
- Now click on “Save as”.
- After that, click on “Online Locations”.
- Click the dropdown arrow to pick the location.
- Choose your folder to save the document in, you can even create a new one.
- Now click on “Set As Default Save Location”.
- From there click on “Save”.
Following the steps above will allow changing your default location from the local drive to the cloud version. This is the only way to achieve the default location change as there isn’t a way to refine the location on the desktop.
Unfortunately for Mac, there isn’t a way to refine your set locations, only a default change either on the online platforms such as OneDrive or local locations such as your desktop. Default locations generally don’t work in a more refined environment such as specific folders or drives, these areas can be altered or the folder can be deleted or become inaccessible, therefore excluding those features seems to have an effective approach for Mac users.
Why wasn’t the preference panel used to change the default location?
You may be wondering from various other forums and question panels why wasn’t the Word preference panel used to make changes to the file location and set it as default. Wouldn’t it be easier to adjust the preferences for the folder there instead of using the method described above? Originally this method was an option, however, Apple has removed it from the file location panel and only left the templates and images that can be altered in the file location tab.
As you can see above, the documents tab has been removed and the only bits of content that remain are the images tab, the templates, and start-up tabs. These are essentially your default system or preference files which can have the locations changed by default.
The documents tab was removed primarily because document locations change all the time and there really isn’t much of a requirement for a feature that won’t get used so often. Therefore they removed it.
This is what the preference panel for file location looked like fore the documents tab was removed. The documents tab would allow you to set a refined location for your documents. Essentially whenever you saved a document its primary location would be set to the one that you set in your documents tab.
Change the default file location locally
While your can default change the location using the preference panel you can alter this preference by changing where you save your files. These changes will reflect where you save the file next time. Follow thor for more information on how you can achieve this.
Step by step guide – Change the default file location locally
- Firstly open your Word document.
Open a word document that you want to change the location off, this change will set across the entire domain.
- After that click on “File”
- Now click on “Save As”.
- Choose the file name.
Ive just simply called it “Test document”.
- Then select the folder.
- Once the formatting is complete, click on “Save”.
I chose the folder called “Banners”, so now anytime I will save a file it will save in this folder by default. You can of course again change the default location by saving your text file to a new folder. This way if you have multiple files that go in one folder you can keep the default save in that folder and then change the location of that folder by saving a new file to another folder.
In-depth – Step by step guide – How to set a default save location in Word for Mac
Step by step breakdown with screenshots
- Firstly, Open your Word document.
- After that click on “File”.
- Now click on “Save as”.
- After that, click on “Online Locations”.
- Click the dropdown arrow to pick the location.
- Choose your folder to save the document in, you can even create a new one.
- Now click on “Set As Default Save Location”.
- From there click on “Save”.
That’s it for this Blog thank you for taking time out to read our content, please feel free to email our team about how it went if you followed the steps or if you need more help with the questions we answered in this Blog.