How to get iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) apps to stop defaulting to iCloud when saving

Ever since I semi-fully embraced iCloud, I’ve found that the iWork apps — Pages, Numbers and Keynote — always default to wanting to save every new document in iCloud, which I never — well, OK, almost never — want to do. It’s fine that it’s an option, but I want the default to be saving to my local hard drive (which, actually, means saving to my Dropbox account).

It didn’t take much effort to find this thread on Apple’s support forums, but the first suggested solution — turning off “Documents and Data” in System Preferences → iCloud — seemed draconian. With this option you can never sync your documents to iCloud.

A little further down the thread I found the “real” solution, courtesy of “Bernie_uk”, which was important enough for me to want to share here.

It requires opening up Terminal, but it’s not too scary. You just have to run this command:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

This command doesn’t turn off anything in iCloud; it just tells the system that your default should be saving files to disk, not to iCloud. Note that since this is a global setting, it will affect not just iWork, but any other apps that use iCloud’s “Documents and Data” syncing. (I guess.)