Forum Discussion
Excel/Word crashing when co authoring
We have had the same issue now for about four weeks, and have raised the issue with Microsoft last week. We have navigated the tier 1 support and now are waiting to hear back.
Summary:-
- We produce large documents in a collaborative fashion, by finding a document in a SharePoint Online document library using the 'Edit in Word' feature.
- We have done this for a long time (co-authoring documents is a large part of what we do) and the issue has only started occurring (and with multiple people) within the last four weeks or so.
- We all use Windows 7, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Office downloaded from Office365
- Within a random amount of time (sometimes a few seconds, sometimes an hour), Word just closes.
- End users do not have OneDrive installed or configured.
- Tested with multiple users, multiple computers, multiple documents, multiple document libraries and sites.
- Microsoft recorded a screen and was able to witness and acknowledge the behaviour twice. Hoping the issue gets escalated; we have a lot of angry users - which is frustrating when we have spent considerable efforts trying to build confidence in using SharePoint Online as a suitable platform for document collaboration
I'm curious to see if this affects organizations who are 100% in the cloud or like mine that are in a transition state and have some on prem stuff along with some being in the cloud.
- either my client has stopped bothering to tell me about the issue, or the issue has gone away, as they haven't mentioned it for what feels like forever! In summary, I have found that in the past, the issue only happens when co authoring (which doesn't happen as often as it used to do, probably because of the issue in the 1st place!), but could be minutes, hours, or even just the 1st click that causes Word/Excel to close with no explanation. MS had been connected to my laptop at least 3 times when the issue occurred, and had no answer to what it could be. They seemed to just drop off the support ticket, but as the client hasnt reported the issue, I havent chased MS myself for a fix.
gbrown481 I'd bet they just aren't reporting it anymore.
Our clients are still having the issue and we have an open ticket with Microsoft. They've had us recording the issue with a tool called the Problem Steps Recorder. Their next step is to do remote support of two users simultaneously while they are co-authoring so they can see the issue first hand.
Based on some of the responses above it seems like even when OneDrive isn't in play coauthoring is still buggy and unreliable.
I look forward to seeing a fix, but I'm not holding my breath.
