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I always save to MY PC option. to My docs. then a folder. I write histories using 50 to 170 pages and always in Word. After a manual editing session (not AI) I saved to My Pc/then Folder name. Or so I thought.I have worked on Long Docs like this since the 90s through all versions of Word with few problems. Never lost the document I also tried to save it to a USB. regular practice as it travels with me for printing etc. and a secure copy if anything goes wrong with my PC. Ninety minutes of searching Cloud, Personal and My PC for the doc and Recents in Word itself I finally found a doc with about right word count and page numbers. It was not where I saved it. It was supposedly in the Cloud which I do no use. PC keeps telling me Cloud is full anyway. I am extremely disappointed and frustrated with the latest version. It used to be simple to use Word even with upgrades. It is now convoluted and instructions are in double speak. NOT CLEAR. Upgrading to 365 has been nothing but trouble since last November when I had to purchase a new tower to do it. Then I had to replace peripherals as they would not communicate with 365. Now the difficulty with the basic command of Save As. The latest version of my Doc I eventually found is still not visible as a Recent in Word. I saved a copy with a different title to every repository for docs and left my PC on all night with it still on the screen so I was sure of finding it to start work again this morning. AI is not necessary, I don't need or want it. My brain and intelligence works fine thank you.
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
This is one of the most common causes of document corruption. With Word closed, copy from your hard drive to a flash drive. If it is on the flash drive, copy to your hard drive, and open from there.
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Hi, you could turn on enhanced search which helps finding documents. EDIT use this for settings re enhanced search: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/experience/performance-optimization/search-indexing-in-windows
You could also save to a folder on C Drive: This PC\C:\Users\UserName. There you will find everything that you have on C Drive, including the OneDrive Folder. You can create a folder there to save to. You will notice a 'Document Folder'. That is the original system document folder. It will be empty because OneDrive grabbed all the document in it. You can check that it is the system document folder by right clicking on it>Properties>It will have a location tab. The same for picture etc. I would not save to system folders because OneDrive may grab them in a future update. The 'Fall Upgrade' absolutely destroyed my system, long time ago but lesson learned.
Note that in Microsoft 365, by default, the Desktop and the Documents folder are synchronized with OneDrive. Therefore, while you may think that you are saving to a folder on your computer, you may actually be saving to OneDrive.
A Microsoft 365 subscription is not necessary to use Word. You can make a one-time purchase of Office 2024 with Outlook or without Outlook. These versions do not have Copilot AI and may be simpler for you to use.
I have to admit, Microsoft has been using marketing to steer users to solutions that are not the best for them. Microsoft 365 and Copilot AI are not necessary or useful to many users.
You can change the default location for saves to your local hard drive.
I did this long ago.
You can change your subscription to Microsoft 365 "Classic" without CoPilot. I did, long ago. However, the change will not take effect until the end of your current subscription.