I still dont know how to easily save files on local computer in MS Office without pressing F12.
Ctrl+S gives you a document where the biggest UI element is a box labelled "Choose a location". Clicking on it shows a bunch of locations on my PC (such as my local documents folder) and has a button that says "More Locations".
This "More Locations" button takes you to the same Save As dialog that you would get to from clicking on File -> Save As, same as in every program of the last 30 years. In its left menu it has two giant buttons for "This PC" and "Browse".
What part wasn't obvious to you?
If you're talking about the web apps (who aren't designed for editing local files), File -> Save As has a button called "Save a Copy" that explicitly says right below that "Download a copy to your computer"
They've designed it in a way that makes my brain go into advert-mode, which basically filters half of the interface until I'm really paying attention and go through it several times.
The trick I’ve found with the ribbon is to anchor against the labels at the bottoms of each grouping. Why they’re at the bottom and not the top, I can’t say, but those labels help me scan if I start from them.
For mouse users, getting to the Save As dialog is actually three clicks in recent versions of Word. F12 is just so much more convenient.
The overlap of "users still using Microsoft Office" and "users using local storage" declines with each passing day. IT admins don't want data outside their retention policy/access logging/subject to user hardware failure, and anyone who thinks cloud storage is a malicious big tech plot left the Microsoft ecosystem years ago.
Alternatively, you could mouse over and click file -> save as or press Alt -> f -> a.
Using your method:
1. Make a new spreadhseet, press CTRL+S
2. Get some super limited menu with few last locations -> doesnt include any of the locations I need
3. Click on random location, ten you have to go down and choose "more locations" -> again doesnt have any of the locations I need, neither on shared drive or local computer; at least there is a shortcut to desktop (in the past it wasnt there since they were pushing cloud even more)
4. The next menu shows you more locations - but still not the new location that you want, so you have to find "browse" button.
Why not press F12 and get a browse button?
Maybe at your work you have one spreadsheet or one PDF, but I often have few open. I also dont even mention the problem of interlinked files (especially Excel files) and Sharepoint, where the folder address become impossible to work with.