Cannot save documents to hard drive
My Macbook will only let me save Word and Excel documents to icloud.
MacBook Air
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My Macbook will only let me save Word and Excel documents to icloud.
MacBook Air
Hey jayfram,
It sounds like you want to use an external device to store data from your Mac. Let's start by working through these steps:
If you can’t move or copy an item on Mac - Apple Support
Take care.
Hi jayfram,
Thanks for clarifying.
Did you have a chance to give those steps a try, as they also pertain to saving files on your Mac? Here's the article again: If you can’t move or copy an item on Mac - Apple Support
If you're still having issues, we'll need some additional information to help us understand what's happening.
Where is the document originating, and what type is it?
What happens when you try to save? If you receive an error message, please let us know what that says.
Thanks!
Hi jayfram,
Thanks for the clarification.
With files not being able to save directly to your Mac, try the following steps to directly address the issue. Make sure that you have available storage on your drive. Go to Apple menu () > About This Mac > Storage.
If you have no available space, you can optimize your storage or move or delete files from your drive.
Check out steps found in Free up storage space on your Mac for an in-depth walkthrough.
If storage is not the issue, close all Office apps and restart your computer from the menu bar Apple menu () > Restart.
Regards.
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.
First please try this simple test. Click anywhere on your Mac's Desktop, then select File > New Folder.
Does that work? If so it indicates your User Account Permissions are correctly set and the problem lies elsewhere.
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.
It is odd. Using the same method (in the Finder), can you create a new folder in Documents, or Downloads for that matter?
Each of those folders should have Permissions equal to that of Desktop.
In general you can save anything to your Home folder including its contents: Desktop, Documents, Pictures, etc. Most everything else is off-limits and will be "greyed out".
Cannot save documents to hard drive