Saving spreadsheets question

I'm making a lot of spreadsheets from downloaded files. When I started using Excel two years ago when I saved files after renaming them they would show up in the Recent files. A few months ago most of these files did not show up in Recent files so I had to search the C disk for them. and they showed up as Roaming files I started copying the files to an Excel Workbook and that worked for a few days but now they are roaming again and some of them I can't find at all. I checked and the default save is to Documents - the box above it is the Roaming files not the default. How can I fix this problem?

Yes I found how to check that in help. Default is - c:\users\marian\documents
Autorecover file location is c:\users\marian\appdata\roaming\microsoft\excel - this is where most of my files are going.
Thanks for responding. Do you have any suggestions?