How to Download a Copy of Your File to Your Computer in Excel Online

Online productivity apps, like those offered by Microsoft Online and Google Drive, are a great alternative to the physical copies of these programs that you might have purchased in the past and installed on your computer.

These online options are typically free, and offer a place where you can save your files to the cloud so that they are accessible from other computers with Internet access. But occasionally you might need to work on these files offline, or share them with someone through email. Our tutorial below will show you how to download a copy of a file from Excel online so that you can have it on your computer and share or edit it as needed.

How to Save to Your Computer from Excel Online

The steps in this article were performed in the desktop version of Google Chrome, but will also work in other desktop Web browsers like Firefox or Edge. Note that you will need to have a Microsoft account to use Excel online, and the file type that you download will be .xlsx. You also have the option of saving the file to the OneDrive account associated with your Microsoft account.

Step 1: Go to Excel online at https://office.live.com/start/Excel.aspx. if you aren’t already signed into your Microsoft account, you will be prompted to do so at this point.

Step 2: Find the file that you wish to download to your computer, or create a new one.

Step 3: Click the File tab at the top-left corner of the window.

Step 4: Choose the Save As option from the column at the left side of the window.

Step 5: Select the Download a Copy option.

Step 6: Navigate to the location on your computer where you wish to download the file, change the name of the file if desired, then click the Save button.

Note that, depending on the current settings of your Web browser, you may not be given the option to choose the download location or change the file name. This article will show you how to adjust the download settings in Google Chrome if you would like to choose these options when downloading files in Chrome.