Excel effectively forces cloud usage now if you want to use autosave. And frankly, Microsoft is doing everything it can to shift users to cloud based Office apps.
They really, really want users and business owners to think of the local data storage and desktop computing as secondary to OneDrive and Webapps. I swear at some point in the future the consumer version of Windows will be little more than the Edge browser in a wig.
Companies now prefer cloud storage because they will still have the data if they fire you as your access will be lost immediately.
You could delete all local files and it will take lot of
time and effort to recover them.
Be me, postal worker. One of our machines uses a csv file to attach zip codes to bins. See fresh engineer decide to change one zip code in notepad really quick. See file's formatting get wrecked. Spend next 6 hours watching all the mail spit out of the very last bin every time they think they finally fix it as if machine has irritable bowel syndrome. Engineer earns nickname 'boy wonder' first week on job
This is why I always save contents as a new file instead of overwriting the original one when I'm using a machine that isn't mine. I've been burned so many times by flimsy newline characters, proper unicode support, legacy encoding and many other stuff you assume it should be already in place.
There are teams where I work that are basically using Excel as a database and SharePoint as S3 in automated processes… But at least no one is going to DIE when those things fall over!
Did you know our company is over a thousand years old, possibly even two? Recent dives into our digital archives have unearthed invoice records dated to the year 1021, though we're also investigating the validity of one dated to 215.
Whoever decided to make dates a manual entry text field without validation should be forced to write SQL by hand, without syntax highlighting, autocompletion, syntax checks, reference or looking up stuff, querying a database with no schema or data dictionary.