Ctrl+S gives you a document where the biggest UI element is a box labelled "Choose a location". Clicking on it shows a bunch of locations on my PC (such as my local documents folder) and has a button that says "More Locations".
This "More Locations" button takes you to the same Save As dialog that you would get to from clicking on File -> Save As, same as in every program of the last 30 years. In its left menu it has two giant buttons for "This PC" and "Browse".
What part wasn't obvious to you?
If you're talking about the web apps (who aren't designed for editing local files), File -> Save As has a button called "Save a Copy" that explicitly says right below that "Download a copy to your computer"
They've designed it in a way that makes my brain go into ad-mode, which basically filters half of the interface until I'm really paying attention to and go through it several times
The trick I’ve found with the ribbon is to anchor against the labels at the bottoms of each grouping. Why they’re at the bottom and not the top, I can’t say, but those labels help me scan if I start from them.
For mouse users, getting to the Save As dialog is actually three clicks in recent versions of Word. F12 is just so much more convenient.
The overlap of "users still using Microsoft Office" and "users using local storage" declines with each passing day. IT admins don't want data outside their retention policy/access logging/subject to user hardware failure, and anyone who thinks cloud storage is a malicious big tech plot left the Microsoft ecosystem years ago.
Alternatively, you could mouse over and click file -> save as or press Alt -> f -> a.
Using your method:
1. Make a new spreadhseet, press CTRL+S
2. Get some super limited menu with few last locations -> doesnt include any of the locations I need
3. Click on random location, ten you have to go down and choose "more locations" -> again doesnt have any of the locations I need, neither on shared drive or local computer; at least there is a shortcut to desktop (in the past it wasnt there since they were pushing cloud even more)
4. The next menu shows you more locations - but still not the new location that you want, so you have to find "browse" button.
Why not press F12 and get a browse button?
Maybe at your work you have one spreadsheet or one PDF, but I often have few open. I also dont even mention the problem of interlinked files (especially Excel files) and Sharepoint, where the folder address become impossible to work with.
You literally cannot even complete a fresh windows 11 install without a live internet connection now, if you're an ordinary non technical end user. It demands to be connected to some form of wired network or wireless with internet access to report home to microsoft and make a cloud based account.
They clearly decided that getting people to sign up for a forever-recurring monthly paid cloud service plan in perpetuity was the best way to go for revenue. Or at least bait them into it by methods like "oh, here's your free 5GB onedrive account, you can totally back up your whole system and use onedrive for everything. What's that, you're out of storage space on your free account? Sign up now for this $12/month account for (some_large_number_of_GB)!"
I like to think that some PM at Microsoft got promoted and brags about how one of those is 'their' button.
Is Office(CurrentYear) easier to use than 1997?
I think I copied everything to my local disk as well, but it’s 20 years of my life, so I’m disinclined from finally trashing all those various services.