Forum Discussion
"Best Practices" for co-authoring?
I end up attending a lot of "meetings" with departments at our institution that end up as more of a gripe session about how things don't work as expected in Office 365. In many cases, the end users j...
AnilK and Chad_V_Kealey
Obviously, Microsoft is not stepping up on this one, so maybe we just need to create our own Best Practices. I'm not an expert, but these are things I have observed:
1. Sometimes 10 co-authors is too many, especially on large Word or Excel files.
2. Avoid Track Changes in Word files. It causes extremely poor performance and a lot of the errors Chad described above.
3. For large Excel files, it is better to convert the file to a list. We've seen too many critical errors in files with over 1000 rows.
Please add your observations. What worked for you? What did not work?
Obviously, Microsoft is not stepping up on this one, so maybe we just need to create our own Best Practices. I'm not an expert, but these are things I have observed:
1. Sometimes 10 co-authors is too many, especially on large Word or Excel files.
2. Avoid Track Changes in Word files. It causes extremely poor performance and a lot of the errors Chad described above.
3. For large Excel files, it is better to convert the file to a list. We've seen too many critical errors in files with over 1000 rows.
Please add your observations. What worked for you? What did not work?
Our current advice (which has helped, but not resolved the issue)
1) Use Client version (2208 has a fix, but it's not in the online version yet)
2) Ensure that your laptop remains connected to the network (we use the One drive status in the system tool tray as diagnostic)
3) Use multilevel paragraph options (even for simple numbering)
Our real problem is the inability to reproduce any of these errors at will. They just happen. I've tried not to extend our consideration to networking and connectivity, because my brain is already ready to explode without the added dimension!
Anil
