If you’re someone who uses Apple’s Pages and Numbers apps to work on documents on your Mac, you probably know that files are saved to iCloud by default. Not everyone wants to store those documents on iCloud and this might be a nuisance for some. Luckily, you can change this in two different ways.
You shouldn’t be surprised that an Apple app prefers to use an Apple service to get things done. If you try to save a document you are working on, be it Pages or Numbers, iCloud will be chosen as the default location to save the files. If you use a different location to save your documents, you’ll have to manually change the destination folder each time you want to save a file. This is by no means ideal, but there is a trick to get the apps to stop recognizing iCloud.
There are two ways to do this. You can either disable iCloud Drive for these apps or use a terminal command to prevent iCloud from showing up in the storage menu. Therefore, if you are interested, we will discuss exactly how to stop Pages and Numbers from being saved to iCloud by default on Mac.
How to prevent Pages & Numbers from saving to iCloud by changing iCloud Drive settings
First, let’s look at how you can change your iCloud settings to ensure that Pages and Numbers doesn’t use iCloud Drive. Here’s what you need to do:
- Click the Apple menu and choose System Preferences from the drop-down menu.
- In System Preferences, click the Apple ID option next to your account name.
- This should automatically take you to the iCloud settings menu. If not, select iCloud in the left pane. Next, click on “Options” for iCloud Drive as shown below.
- Now simply uncheck Pages and Numbers from this list and click Done.
That’s pretty much all you have to do.
How to stop saving Pages & Numbers to iCloud using Terminal Command
The above method is just one way to do this. Alternatively, you can use a Terminal command to ensure the iCloud destination doesn’t show up in Pages and Numbers while trying to save files. Just follow the steps below:
- First you need to launch Terminal. Click Go on the menu bar and select Utilities from the drop-down menu.
- This will open a Finder window on your Mac and take you to the Utilities folder. You should be able to find the Terminal app here. click it
- Now just enter the following command:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false
- You must restart your Mac for the changes to take effect. If you decide to change your mind and revert those changes to use iCloud to store files again, use the following command:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool true
Here we go. You have learned two different ways to prevent iCloud from being used to store files in the Pages and Numbers apps.
From now on, whenever you try to save a file using the Pages or Numbers apps, you won’t find the iCloud option next to the Where field. Instead, one of the local directories or folders can be selected to store the files. You no longer have to manually switch to a local destination every time.
Although we’ve focused specifically on Apple’s Pages and Numbers apps in this particular article, you can use these exact steps to prevent Keynote presentation files from being saved to iCloud as well. This applies to all of Apple’s cloud-based apps, which include iWork productivity software and the built-in TextEdit app.
However, if you only use local storage every now and then, here you can learn in detail how to change storage location from iCloud to Mac local storage manually.
We hope you were able to use this procedure to set your Mac to automatically use a local destination instead of iCloud to store your documents. Which of these two methods did you use? Share your experiences and don’t hesitate to give your valuable opinions in the comments section below.
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