All Recent & Pinned File Links Lost

As of today, 23Mar24 1300CDT it looks like MS has fixed the issue. You may have to rebuild your recent and pinned lists, but the newly recent and newly pinned files seem to be "sticking."

Agree. So far. Time will tell. But I've started rebuilding my "Recent" lists in Excel & Word

I run two newer systems (Dec 2023).

Win 11; One Drive disabled on both systems (never used); Run stand alone MS Office 2021.

As of today, 23Mar24 1300CDT it looks like MS has fixed the issue. You may have to rebuild your recent and pinned lists, but the newly recent and newly pinned files seem to be "sticking."

Now I can open Office apps without being logged in but it says it's unlicensed and all functionality for editing anything is lost. When I log in, they walk me through a series of screens regarding sending them optional data. Account > Account Privacy > Manage Settings displays more options for sharing additional data, a number of which are checked by default. If I log out, any recent files that were opened while being logged in disappear so MS is in fact keeping track of the files that we open.

Anytime you log out and log back in, you are forced to restart the Office application and go through the four screens requesting to send diagnostic data.

Cut it out Microsoft!

From your experience using this product while not being logged in, do you think that when they say "all functionality for editing anything is lost" that they only mean the Recent files list is not provided/maintained such that it will always be empty?

Or, are there more consequences that you have seen for not being logged in? Such as not receiving maintenance updates, assuming those things happen.

Because if that's all I lose is the Recent list, then I am quite ok to not be logged in.

Too bad the software on my hard drive is insufficient to maintain a Recents list on its own.

I guess my question is open to anybody.

Thank you.

I agree with David..."it must involve OneDrive and how Word interacts with that server-based data". My recent list functionality also has returned without an update. Yesterday, I totally uninstalled One Drive as I've always been suspect of it anyways. This didn't help. Today everything is fixed however, when I click the Open icon, "OneDrive - personal" is still displayed. If I click on it and right-click the folder and select "Copy path to clipboard" and paste it to notepad, it displays "https://d.docs.live.net/........".  If I paste the URL into a browser, it brings me to One Drive online with my account info.

Hey, Microsoft. I do not want One Drive! I have uninstalled it. Do not host web space for files from my computer. I do not want this!

One other note. I never "Stay logged in" when signing into Microsoft and until yesterday everything has worked fine. Now, I can no longer run an Office app that's installed on my PC without being logged in to my Microsoft accoutn. Hmmmm. Cut it out Microsoft!

You cannot stop OneDrive from being reinstalled as its part of Windows and if its files are missing, it will automatically reinstall it. To keep it from LOADING up you need to disable it via Task Manager on the "Startup" tab by right-clicking and selecting "Disable".