Moving data off Microsoft cloud

Q: When using Microsoft Office 365, is there a way to change the default storage location from MS One Drive to the local hard drive instead?

A: The default save location of Microsoft One Drive was a change that came with the update to Office 365 in June 2019.

Microsoft continues to try and push users of their product to the cloud as well as trying to have everyone use a Microsoft account for things like account and license management. Sometimes this is good, but many times it’s less than desirable. I prefer to save my documents locally, whereas others might want to have their documents in the cloud so they can be accessed from multiple devices.

To change the default save location in Office 365 open the application you want to modify and click on File and then Options.

In the Save section, put a check in the box next to where is says Save to Computer by default which will cause the application to save to your local Documents folder. If you want to choose a different save location, you can specify that here.

Q: Last week you wrote about removing unwanted autocomplete addresses from Gmail. Is there a way to do this with Outlook? I have a number of mistyped addresses I would like to clear out.

A: Outlook actually makes this pretty simple. As you start to type an email address and you see the unwanted address pop up as a suggestion, you’ll notice an X to the right of the address.

All you have to do is click that X and Outlook will delete the erroneous suggestion.

To clear out more than one erroneous address, click on File and then Options and then Mail. Look in the Send messages section and here you can choose Empty Auto-Complete List.

Keep in mind that this will not delete any of your contacts. This just modifies the addresses stored in your Recent People list.