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Excel365 and SPO - I despair
Looking for some feedback from our resident boffins. I have many Excels that link to other Excels. All these Excels are stored on Sharepoint Online (SPO). All our Excels use VBA, so working in ...
By pure fluke, I stumbled upon the answer to my question. When you go into One Drive/Settings under Office there is a flag "Use Office applications ...". When you uncheck this, SPO/OD revert to a working model that is akin to Dropbox, Google Drive et al. Unchecked the AutoSaveOn property simply disappears. I am "offline". Obviously, all the fancy real-time collaboration features disappear but so does all the grief bemoaned above.
In the ultimate ironic twist of fate, many of the frustrations that led us to abandon Dropbox (and switch to SPO) however also reappear. Office apps establish locks which they are VERY reluctant to release. So when you are in an Excel workbook and press Save in the deliberate attempt to upload an image, this DOES NOT happen until Excel releases the lock on that workbook. If you are VERY LUCKY, Excel will release that lock upon you closing the workbook. If OD were not so sluggish to respond to changes on the local drive, it would start uploading the second you close the file and you reopen it right away and all would be well.
Given how sluggish OD is, you might find you need to fetch a coffee before you reload. Given the uncertainty when these locks are dropped, however, you might find that after you got the coffee, nothing happened. To be positive that these locks are dropped, you would really need to quit Excel altogether.
An easier workaround concerns downloading new copies of linked workbooks. When you close the workbook, OD will likely not sync because the links from other open workbooks do not move Excel to drop the lock on the linked (and now closed) workbook. But, incongruously (I would argue), Windows does allow you delete the workbook. So, as fortune favours the brave, I delete the workbook from my local drive. With my heart in my mouth I then wait a moment after which OD will normally restore the file from SPO. On the odd occasion where this operation goes wrong (and I actually delete the file from SPO), I need to restore the file to SPO...
In the ultimate ironic twist of fate, many of the frustrations that led us to abandon Dropbox (and switch to SPO) however also reappear. Office apps establish locks which they are VERY reluctant to release. So when you are in an Excel workbook and press Save in the deliberate attempt to upload an image, this DOES NOT happen until Excel releases the lock on that workbook. If you are VERY LUCKY, Excel will release that lock upon you closing the workbook. If OD were not so sluggish to respond to changes on the local drive, it would start uploading the second you close the file and you reopen it right away and all would be well.
Given how sluggish OD is, you might find you need to fetch a coffee before you reload. Given the uncertainty when these locks are dropped, however, you might find that after you got the coffee, nothing happened. To be positive that these locks are dropped, you would really need to quit Excel altogether.
An easier workaround concerns downloading new copies of linked workbooks. When you close the workbook, OD will likely not sync because the links from other open workbooks do not move Excel to drop the lock on the linked (and now closed) workbook. But, incongruously (I would argue), Windows does allow you delete the workbook. So, as fortune favours the brave, I delete the workbook from my local drive. With my heart in my mouth I then wait a moment after which OD will normally restore the file from SPO. On the odd occasion where this operation goes wrong (and I actually delete the file from SPO), I need to restore the file to SPO...