How To Turn Off Excel’s AutoSave By Default

The AutoSave Setting

Since its release, Microsoft has elected to have their AutoSave feature (which constantly saves copies of your file to the cloud) toggled on by default. There are a lot of cases where you may want to be selective or more in control of when you actually save the changes you have made to your Excel spreadsheets. In this post, I will walk you through the steps you need to take in order to keep prevent AutoSave from being activated when you create new workbooks files.

Quick Summary: Steps to Turn Off AutoSave by Default

1. Select the File tab on the Excel Ribbon
2. Select Options
3. Navigate to Save menu

4. Uncheck AutoSave files stored in the Cloud by default in Excel

   • Note: the wording of this option may differ slightly based on the Excel version you are running

Turning Off AutoSave By Default

To turn AutoSave off by default, you will need to first navigate to your Excel options dialog box. You can do this by clicking on the File tab in the Excel Ribbon.

Next click on the Options menu item at the very bottom of the side-menu pane.

Now, you’ll want to navigate to the Save options and find the Save Workbooks section (this is currently the very first section at the time of writing this post).

To remove the default setting of turning on AutoSave, simply uncheck the checkbox option for AutoSave files stored in the Cloud by default in Excel. Click the OK button at the bottom of the dialog box and your setting will be changed.

Now the next time you open a new workbook in Excel, the AutoSave feature will be defaulted to off.

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Chris Newman

Chris is a finance professional and Excel MVP recognized by Microsoft since 2016. With his expertise, he founded TheSpreadsheetGuru blog to help fellow Excel users, where he shares his vast creative solutions & expertise. In addition, he has developed over 7 widely-used Excel Add-ins that have been embraced by individuals and companies worldwide.