Cannot save documents to hard drive

Sorry I was busy and didn't have a chance to respond. No, that is not helpful. The problem isn't that I can't move a document from one location to another, the permissions are all read and write for documents on my laptop. I can call up documents and open them. But, if I create a new document, the only way I can save it is to the cloud; the create a new document, or I open a document (Word or Excel), to try to save it to any subfolder on my hard drive - for example, my "Documents" folder - the folder is grayed out and it is impossible to save anything to it. The only place I can save anything is icloud. Similarly if I open a document from my Documents folder, I can "save" it to the same file, but if I hit "save as," any folder on my hard drive is again grayed out - the only option is to save it to icloud. Or if I open a document from icloud, I can't save it to my hard drive folders, only to icloud. The main issue is when I create a new document, and I can only save it to icloud. I'm prevented from saving anything to my hard drive that isn't already there.

I have over 700 gb of free space on my Macbook (which is almost brand new, I purchased one with t1 of storage space). I restarted, the "documents" area of my hard drive is still grayed out when I try to save a new Word document to it.

Yes I was able to create a file on my desktop, and save a new Word document into it. So now I at least have a folder on my desktop that I can save things to, but my Documents folder on my hard drive otherwise is still locked. I noticed that there is a document that I created a couple of weeks ago for notes of a phone conversation I had with a salesman that is saved to that Documents folder, so evidently I was able to do it then, but evidently I did something along the way that now prevents me from saving any new documents to it. Have no idea what I might have done.

Well this is odd, I just downloaded a statement from one of my accounts and tried to save the pdf and I found that even the icloud drive is grayed out. Something weird is going on. At least I have that desktop folder I can save things to now. Hopefully the Genius Bar folks can help me sort this out.

OK! So a couple of things, first, I realized that I am able to save things to icloud even though it appears grayed out when I am saving a document.

Second, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I was just trying to save the documents to the Macintosh HD in general, I thought I had navigated to the My Documents subfolder in the HD. So when I actually clicked on the My Documents folder, the documents did save to it. It's just when I am trying to save to the Macintosh HD that I get the error message that the document could not be saved because of a permissions error. So mea culpa and thanks for your efforts to help!

No, I'm trying to save documents to my own laptop, not an external device.