Stop Office BACKUP THIS DOCUMENT prompt

"What is the product that Microsoft is selling? It is YOU! If they have all of your work, they can mine it to characterize you, create a behavioral profile, and sell that information to those who can exploit it. I don't know if they actually do this, but they CAN do it if you let them be your storage bin. They seem to have backed off lately on ramming Bing and Edge down our throats. For a while, everywhere you might accidentally click set Bing as yourg search provider and Edge as your browser. And that annoying research window in Excel that cannot be turned off.... But now a new intrusion is coming: their wonderful AI assistant will be in your face full-screen popup blocking your work, whether you like it or not."

Convoluted and needlessly conspiratorial. The rationale is far more right in front of your nose. They do this to pester you into using their cloud services, because giving in is the easy way for most, so that you then end up buying more of the same and giving them more money. Simple, effective and odious. There is no guessing, this is exactly what they do do, openly, it works, it earns them a fortune, it IS why they do it. No shady data theft required.

Did not work for me. I am desperate to fix this. Very annoying to have to close the banner every time I start Word or Excel.

As a cloud hater, it is very weird that Microsoft is constantly trying to push cloud services in my face.

Thank you so much! That fixed it for me, too!

The scripts shown in posts on pages 3 and 8 are very effective at blocking the banner, but occasionally I still get it. It happens rarely enough to be no more than a mild nuisance, however.

But given Microsoft's slow rollout of higher subscription fees to pay for their AI whether we use it or not, along with trying to force us to use OneDrive, I'm seriously considering a more radical solution: LibreOffice. It's free, able to read and write docx etc (although there are reports of some glitches), has almost the same functionality (though I'm having trouble reproducing one of my macros), and did I mention it's free?

Also Microsoft 365 has a free web version (with reduced functionality), but I have reservations about using it, an obvious reason being that our documents would be on their servers and can't be backed up in a manner we control.

Are there any you can recommend? I've tried LibreOffice but found it even slower than Office for complex files.