This user's question is a small window into a much larger problem. The fact that opening a daily spreadsheet from OneDrive still requires clicking through menus in 2025 tells you everything about how legacy software thinks about your time. It treats the cloud as a storage location, not a workflow partner.
Here is the practical reality: you are doing manual labor that software should handle. When you open Excel, navigate folders, and click a file, you are performing a ritual that adds zero value to your day. The file lives in OneDrive, so your Mac cannot treat it like a local file with a simple alias or startup item. Microsoft's own ecosystem should bridge this gap, but it does not. The disconnect between the cloud promise and the desktop reality is what frustrates users like this one, people who just want to get to work.
What this reveals is a deeper friction in how we interact with data. Traditional spreadsheets were designed for a world where files lived on a single machine. The cloud changed that, but the interface did not evolve with it. You should be able to tell your spreadsheet, "I open you first thing every morning," and have it obey. That is not a luxury; it is a basic productivity expectation. The fact that a workaround exists for local files but not for cloud files shows that the tool is built around its own architecture, not around the user's actual behavior.
The solution is not a hack or a third-party script. The solution is a fundamental rethinking of how spreadsheets connect to your daily rhythm. An AI-native spreadsheet does not wait for you to find a file. It learns which data you reach for, when you reach for it, and it surfaces that information before you ask. That is the direction we should be moving toward, not finding better ways to click through folders, but eliminating the clicking entirely. The question from this user is valid, but the real answer is that the tool itself should have already solved this problem.