For those whose lives are inseparable from consumer tech, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine how the other half lives. While we’ll never know the reason for sure, it perhaps serves as a stopgap explanation to why Microsoft is doing what it recently announced. Soon, it will be making new Word documents automatically save to the cloud.
Naturally, the default here is the OneDrive which Microsoft itself owns. But the company says you can set your own preferred cloud destination. The company argues that the benefit of this is so that you’ll never have to worry about losing work. Of course, there’s the other benefit of things being saved to the cloud being that they can be accessed anywhere with ain internet connection.
On the surface, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea, until you look at its implementation. With this, Word saves your work in the cloud instead of your local drive, rather than as an additional copy. Which can be fine for certain work organisations that work that way. But for everyone else, this looks like additional unnecessary steps in the work process.
But, as I alluded to earlier, this may actually be helpful for those with low tech literacy but against all odds is able to make use of the cloud. Specifically, people who struggle with the concept of directories and file locations come to mind. Either way, this feature is now being tested by Microsoft 365 Insiders running Word for Windows users running Version 2509 (Build 19221.20000) or later. Judging from the response from the blog post, it’s probably not a guarantee that it gets rolled out to everyone.
(Source: Microsoft)
