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Paul Chapman's avatar
Paul Chapman
Iron Contributor
Feb 14, 2017
Solved

Adding SharePoint Online site(s) to Trusted Locations in Excel 2016

Hello,

 

When users open their files in Excel from SPO they get the yellow 'READ-ONLY' bar and are prompted to Edit Workbook. I can see why it works that way. However, I was looking to see if it was possible to disable this prompt for files from our 365 tenant and I can't do it. I am in Trust Centre settings for Excel and I unticked Enable Protected View for files originating from the Internet. When that didn't make a difference I also unticked Enable Protected View for files located in potentially unsafe locations. That didn't stop the bar appearing either.

 

Short version, can I stop the READ-ONLY prompt appearing for files from Office 365? Supplementary question, if I can, is that a really stupid thing to do? I'd have hoped that files stored in 365 are being scanned for issues at various times already.

 

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Paul

  • Dennis Rylski's avatar
    Dennis Rylski
    Copper Contributor
    Tried below workaround that I found searching the internet, and it does work. Recommend only doing this on spreadsheets you edit frequently as you end up converting them into Macro-enabled (.xlsm) spreadsheets. Go into the VBA module (press Alt-F11). Double click on ‘ThisWorkbook’ and add the following lines (between the dashes): -------------- Private Sub Workbook_Open() ActiveWorkbook.LockServerFile End Sub ------------- You will need to save as a macro-enabled workbook (.xlsm), and do this for every SharePoint file you want to automatically open as Read-Write with Excel 2016…
    • Paul Chapman's avatar
      Paul Chapman
      Iron Contributor
      Thanks Sergei, you are right. I was barking up the wrong tree. Looks like there is no option to change the behaviour (yet) but at least I now know lots of other people are also annoyed about it! :)

      Paul
      • bart_vermeersch's avatar
        bart_vermeersch
        Steel Contributor

        If I'm not mistaken, there is an idea you can support on uservoice for this request.

         

        I hope, with the recent annoucement that co-authoring in Excel became available in Office insider, it is just a matter of a few months before this will be changed (unless it need to stay compatible with older versions and thus locked for another year).

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