macOS won’t let Microsoft Word autosave to iCloud Drive, only OneDrive

The first thing I would do is review the Word Preferences > Save panel and read carefully the first Save Option about where Word is designed to AutoSave. This would be classical Microsoft.

I am on Tahoe 26.1 and Word 16.103.1 will initially manually save to iCloud Drive but not AutoSave there. If I take that still blank Word .docx and drag it to my Desktop, and paste new content into that document, it still does not AutoSave.

I can only draw the conclusion that this is one of the following.

• Microsoft intentional, restricting AutoSave to OneDrive
• A bug introduced by Microsoft
• Microsoft is using their own implementation of AutoSave and not that of macOS
• Possibly a bug in macOS Tahoe that effects this version of Word.

Athough I do have a spare version of Office 2021 for Mac Home and Business, I do not care to reinstall it into Sequoia to see if this AutoSave feature works with iCloud Drive and the local drive. I do not recall any issues with Word AutoSave when I had this Office suite installed on Sequoia.

Click on "Save As"

Click on "Online Locations"

Click on "On My Mac"

Save the Document where you would save anything else that you are putting on iCloud. You will notice the Greyed out "Save As Default Save Location" once you have setup Word to save to iCloud

T-tt3 wrote:

On macOS, Microsoft Word (and some other apps) cannot autosave or save directly to iCloud Drive.

These apps can autosave normally to OneDrive, Dropbox, and other cloud services, but not to iCloud Drive.

On iOS/iPadOS, these same apps can save and autosave directly into iCloud Drive using the Files app.

So this limitation appears to be specific to macOS.

This creates an inconsistent experience between macOS and iOS/iPadOS and forces Mac users to rely on OneDrive instead of iCloud Drive if they want autosave to work.

I’m trying to understand whether this is a macOS limitation or whether there is a setting that enables autosave to iCloud Drive for third-party apps like Word.

If it is a current limitation, I’d really like to see macOS support autosaving to iCloud Drive in the same way that iOS/iPadOS already do.

Hold on, there! Full Stop.

I didn't know about this anti-feature until you pointed it out. So thanks for that.

But otherwise, everything you've said is wrong.

What you are describing is a limitation that was designed into Word, on purpose, by Microsoft. Microsoft had to do extra word to prevent autosave from functioning. Autosave is a built-in feature of any document-based app on any Apple platform. The fact that it works on iOS shows this, because apparently Microsoft put less work into that platform.

I've used Microsoft Word for many years, decades, in fact. It most definitely used to have autosave. I was quite annoyed at how much recent versions of Word push Word's OneDrive. I even went to the trouble of ending my Office 365 subscription and then buying it again via Apple's Mac App Store just so I could stop Microsoft's endless updates and constant OneDrive nonsense. I only started using Microsoft Word again after Apple trashed Pages years ago. Pages '09 was a great app. There's never been anything like it since.

Every application needs permission to save on some locations. AFAICT the MS applications are not treated differently from any others.

Did you not get a dialog window asking for permission? What exactly happens when you try to save to a location in iCloud Drive?

It works the same way on Windows. It will only autosave to OneDrive, not the local file system.