I write a lot of documents in Word. You can imagine my frustration this morning when confronted with an error while trying to change a simple option for pen usage. After fiddling about with it for several minutes, I determined that any change of options resulted in the frustrating error.

The error message appears both in a pop-up dialog box and in the Microsoft Office Alerts section of the event viewer. It reads ” The server drafts location you entered for offline editing is not valid or you do not have permission to access that location. Specify a location on your local computer.” What? This is my home computer. I’m not connected to a server.

My first thought was to specify a location and continue on my merry way, but no joy. You cannot edit the field in question because it also causes the error. My next action was to run a repair on Office by going to Settings -> Apps -> Selecting the Office app and then Modify. This didn’t work either.

I found a few other people suggesting various fixes on-line including adding a string value registry key named “Location” with a valid path for the value (example, C:\users\username\documents\) in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\Offline\Options. This workaround did in fact allow the settings to change, but I was not satisfied with this solution. It seems unlikely that Microsoft intends for users to edit the registry on every computer with Word installed on it. Something else was causing this problem.

Eventually I traced the problem down to a OneDrive failure that had occurred on my system a while back. I had previously configured OneDrive to sync files to a D drive. That drive became problematic, so I unlinked my PC from OneDrive synching and removed the disk. Then I re-enabled OneDrive pointing it at the default location on C.

I had not noticed that the Documents library in Windows Explorer remained pointed at the previous location on the D drive, so was the Pictures library. This was the true cause of the error message. Microsoft 365 products save to OneDrive by default. I reset the libraries by right clicking on them, going to the location tab, and clicking the “Restore Default” button. This generates an error, just click ignore.

If you are experiencing this error and the traditional fixes haven’t worked. Try checking the location of your document libraries and ensure they are fully accessible.