OneDrive

Until now, when we saved a file that we worked with in Microsoft Word We used the hard drive or SSD of our computers. However, that just changed, and Microsoft has decided that your files are stored by default in your cloud. It is an idea that has its advantages, but also important drawbacks. what has happened. At an event dedicated to OneDrive and Copilot this week, Microsoft has announced new features for your cloud storage service. In the version of Word for Windows, new documents will be saved directly to OneDrive and automatic saving of those documents will be activated automatically. Good on the one hand. At Microsoft they explained that they knew “how frustrating it can be to search for important files on different devices and locations.” That has made them decide that instead of saving them directly to your device, are saved in the cloudwhere they are always available and from any other computer and place. It’s a good idea to have those documents ready to be accessed from other computers, but it has several major drawbacks. Also activating automatic auto-save will prevent us from losing work. Privacy and security. For starters, uploading documents to the cloud by default can raise privacy and security concerns. What happens if the document contains confidential or sensitive information? Would we really want to upload that document to the cloud? If someone gets our OneDrive credentials—and that happensespecially when we reuse passwords— you will be able to access all our documents and, if there is sensitive information in them, collect it. Will they use those files to train their AI models? Microsoft Support Managers they have made it clear in the past that “our terms of service clearly state that we do not use customer data to train our AI models.” The privacy terms and the website of theMicrosoft Responsible AI” seem to confirm this, although they do point out that they do use the conversations with Copilot—but not the documents themselves—to improve those models. It is not a backup, it is the only copy. Normally we turned to OneDrive and other cloud storage services as ways to have a backup copy of our documents and thus get closer to that philosophy of “Backups 3-2-1“. With this type of feature, the files are stored directly in OneDrive, and although we have a local folder synchronized with the OneDrive files on our computer, Microsoft reverses the process here: before we saved those files in another folder and then we also uploaded them to OneDrive if we wanted. Now that copy of OneDrive is the only one. You can go back to business as usual. Microsoft will set this option by default, but users can deactivate it so that the office application behaves in a traditional way and offers the saving of files on our PC or laptop. It is likely, however, that many users will not even do it if they do not know about this change. They will simply assume it, something that can end up causing confusion. What if I don’t have a connection? It is true that it is normal that at this point we work on documents when we have the computer connected to the internet, but that cannot be the case. If that happens, we will not be able to save to OneDrive or have the autosave option working with those cloud operations. What will happen then? It is likely that in this scenario Microsoft Word will save files temporarily in the computer’s storage system, but that detail is not clarified. Another way to encourage you to pay for OneDrive. Microsoft is obsessed with getting you to use (and pay for) its services. We already saw how they are blocking the installation of Windows 11 with local accountsand this automatic autosave in OneDrive also aims to boost the use of OneDrive and Microsoft 365, its two great solutions for end users and businesses. Image | Ed Hardie In Xataka | Microsoft embraces the ‘working vibe’: it has launched Excel and Word that are controlled with prompts