For decades, the procedure for writing up a document has remained the same. You open up MS Word, type up what you need and click the save icon. You probably have Word set to save to your My Documents folder, which for home users is likely on your C: drive, though businesses might have it default to a shared network drive. That’s about to change as the cloud goes from novelty to necessity.
At an event centring on OneDrive and Copilot, Microsoft revealed several new features. One announcement in particular drew attention, as it marked a fundamental change in how Windows deals with saving files. Yet this particular change did not have much attention drawn to it, unlike other features such as ‘Knowledge Agent in SharePoint’ and a new sharing system called the ‘Hero Link.’
“Starting today, new documents in Word desktop on Windows (Insiders) now save directly to OneDrive, with autosave enabled your work is protected and ready for real-time collaboration.” says the announcement on Microsoft’s Tech Community blog. This means that for anyone using the Windows Insider preview builds will now have files created in MS Word saved to OneDrive by default, instead of saved locally or to a specified network drive.
Users will be able to turn this off, but making OneDrive the default has obvious implications for security and privacy. Many might not even notice that the save location has changed, since the process of creating, modifying and saving a document has become an ingrained habit.
OneDrive does have an offline mode, which helpfully shields users from outages that could block file access. The cloud storage service is also extremely useful to ensure vital data is backed up, and for ease of collaboration for teams in different locations and time zones, as users are able to sync files across multiple devices. However, files stored in a cloud environment are naturally more vulnerable to hackers, which is a particular concern for files that contain personal or secure data. A recent string of high-profile cyberattacks and data breaches might make some users and businesses wary about trusting sensitive data to a cloud-based service.
At the moment, this change only seems to apply to the Insider builds of Windows 11. In most other current builds of Windows 11, Word or Excel documents will only save automatically to OneDrive if they have been saved there previously, and autosave is turned on. It is unclear when Microsoft plans to change this for mainline Windows 11 builds.
