How do I stop my Mac OS X from copying Microsoft documents onto my desktop?
November 24th, 2009 | by admin |I have a Mac OS X operating system. Every time I view a Microsoft document, (word, excel, ppt) it places a copy of the document on my desktop. Is there a preference that I can turn this off? It really crowds up my desktop when I am viewing several documents off the internet or through my email.
The default download directory for most mail clients or internet browsers is the desktop. Your computer has to download these files off the internet before it can look at them- and that’s any file, not just an Office document. I would recommend going to the preferences (Command+Comma in most instances, or look at the application menu) for Mail and Safari, or whichever apps you use, and changing the download folder to something that is not in your face so much. The downloads will still add, up, but they won’t clutter your desktop and you can clean out the folder any time you like. Leopard changed the default download folder to a separate folder in your documents, rather than your desktop, and put a link in the dock- but Tiger didn’t do a very clean job of things.