Make Office programs save to onedrive local first rather than cloud first

[Ben Parkinson]

We are having an issue with Excel and onedrive/sharepoint that when we are offline on customer sites with our surface pros. A VBnet program we developed with Excel saves its progress and generated pdfs to the cloud first: https://xxx-my.sharepoint.com which it can't do when offline, this causes the excel app issues because it hasn't actually saved its progress in our onedrives offline as it can't reach sharepoint to first. 

It is important that we can change this as a setting as issuing this program out to our field staff, we need to have it as user-friendly as possible and reduce the chance of errors occurring and confusing our team. We know you can save to the local onedrive explicitly first by going to 'browse' from the 'save as' which prevents the issue but we need to mitigate issues rather than provide more complicated guidance.

[#2]

Can you not modify the VB application to save to the relevant locally syncronised folder of the OneDrive / SharePoint library? That way it's always saving to an "offline" location, and if you happen to be online then it will immediately sync up.

[#3]

It's using the Excel application so goes off Excel settings.

[#4]

Does anyone else have any ideas which can help with this? It has been 5 years and we have had to change the app to work outside of OneDrive/SharePoint for the time being but we would like to move our file structure to be backed up by SharePoint but if we are working offline predominantly we will have this issue where cloud-first saving causes the app the fallover.

[#5]

@Ben Parkinson 

The best solution is to stop syncing. When you are done saving your Office files, re enable syncing. This is what Microsoft suggest. I dont think thats feasible but it is what it is.