You may have been working in a Microsoft Word document at the same time as someone else for many years. Since Word 2010, if the file is stored somewhere like OneDrive or SharePoint, you’ve shared the file with the people you want to collaborate with, and it’s in .DOCX format rather than .DOC format.
The Share button at the top right of the ribbon shows you which other people are working in the same document as you, and colored flags with their initials show you where in the file they’re making changes, so everyone doesn’t try to make the same change at the same time. Microsoft calls this co-creation.
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Word editing conflicts can lead to confusion and loss of work
Older versions of Word lock the entire paragraph where each person has placed their cursor to prevent overwriting, but even though you can see where someone else is typing, you can still edit something that interferes with that what they’re working on – and if one of you is working offline, you can both edit the same sentence in different ways.
If you’re using Word on the iPad, two people can edit the same section at the same time, but the document won’t save until you check the Conflicts tab to make a decision about which edits conflict.
If you make conflicting changes in desktop Word while offline, when you come back online you’ll see a OneDrive sync error when you come back online telling you to open the document and deal with the conflict (your changes will be stored in a local copy of the document with your computer name appended). If this happens while you’re online, you’ll see an error bar in Word telling you that your upload failed and autosave will stop working – and you’ll stop seeing other people’s new changes in the document, so if you continue to work you will only go back further.
Either way, fixing the problem meant discarding your own changes (choose Discard Changes), saving a local copy of the document – or temporarily copying the contents to a blank document – and then redoing all your changes, either by doing Scroll through the document manually or using the Compare tools on the Review tab of the ribbon.
Sometimes you’ll see a Resolve button on the error bar that lets you step through all the conflicting changes as if you were using change tracking and accept or reject each one. This usually means that someone editing the document hadn’t enabled autosave in the first place, but it may actually be easier to troubleshoot because it makes it clear where the problems lie.
Troubleshoot collaboration issues
The new way to recover from these types of edit conflicts that was rolled out in recent Office Insider builds (2208 and later Beta Channel) also lets you review conflicting edits without making them look like an error. or ask you to create multiple documents so you can copy and paste what you’ve already typed once. Instead, the yellow notification at the top of your document asks you to review conflicting changes and displays them as tracked changes, but the author is shown in Microsoft Word rather than one of your colleagues.
- Click Review Changes and you’ll see the conflicts highlighted in the document. You may need to enable Show Markups or select All Markups under Track Changes in the Review tab of the toolbar to make them visible.
- Or you can use the Accept and Reject browse buttons in the Changes drop-down list to cycle through and process each one.
But make sure you’re not working in an offline copy of the document while you’re editing, so everyone can see your changes while you’re working, and you’ll get the changes they make live in the document.
Sometimes you’ll find that you and another author made different choices, such as using a word or digit for a number or updating a reference with newer information. Other times you’ll find that the text you added to the document has been deleted – not because someone else deleted it on purpose, but because Word couldn’t download it and sync the document ; in this case, rejecting the change will put back what you added without all the extra work of copying or retyping it.
You may also see a Refresh button on the toolbar telling you that a newer version of the document is available; it means there was a problem with your network connectivity, but you didn’t make any conflicting changes. Although Word can’t automatically update the document with other people’s changes, you don’t have to edit your own work.
It may happen that Word suddenly closes, reopens and tells you that the document has been updated – this means that you had the same type of network problems, but they are resolved and you do not need to modify your changes. . Think of it as Word hitting the refresh button for you without asking – it’s annoying, but it saves you having to make decisions about conflicting edits later because you’re not working in an older version of the document.
Co-authoring in Word, SharePoint and OneDrive
If you’re using Word on the web, a mobile version of Word, or the desktop version of Word 2016 or later, changes are saved automatically and you’ll see everyone else’s changes more or less in real time – as long as you have all Microsoft 365 subscriptions. Someone who’s using an older version of Word or doesn’t have an Office subscription will need to click Save to sync their changes and see yours.
Similarly, multiple people can edit the same Word file at the same time if it is stored in SharePoint Server. When one person saves the file, everyone else working on it receives a notification that there are new changes that they can choose to see immediately or wait and see later.
It’s the same experience as working on a document stored in OneDrive or OneDrive for Business when you’re offline: you can continue editing it, and when you come back online, other people in the document will be notified of your changes. , and you’ll see a notification for any changes they’ve made. You will also receive a notification that someone has made changes when you reopen a document that has been modified since the last time you worked on it.
If you stick with Word on the web, you can share and edit documents collaboratively when they’re stored on services that can handle co-authoring like Box, Dropbox, or Citrix ShareFile, and depending on the subscription you have at your storage service, you may not need an Office subscription. With Box and some other services, you can also co-author on iOS; with Dropbox, it also works on Android. But you can’t co-author documents stored in Google Drive in Office on the web or on any other device.
If you can’t get co-creation to work, there’s a few things to check, starting with whether you are online. Very long documents, documents that have been left open for a very long timeGroup Policy, document permissions, master documents, the presence of macros in the document, ActiveX controls, and OLE objects can all block concurrent editing.
The most common problem is conflicting edits, which is when two authors make different edits to the same section. These Word co-authoring updates that notify writers provide a more transparent way to approve or reject changes, and automatic document refresh reduces confusion when multiple people are working in a document.
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