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Saving to Groups from Office Desktop Applications
So Microsoft Teams led me to discover Office 365 Groups. The biggest failing, for me is the apparent inability to start a document in Word or Excel and then SaveAs to the Group's file store (unless I have already opened a file from the Group and it's in my recent). I'm I missing something?
Angus,
Appreciate the feedback and keep it coming!
The experience you are seeing is what will likely be in the first release.
To each of your points:
1) We are looking into different ways of making this list a bit easier to manage for future releases. The ability to remove a Group from the list is one of them, as well as supporting ways to filter the list.
2) I'll need to follow up on the ordering of the followed list. I believe it is ordered by when you followed the site on the SharePoint experience...
3) The ability to 'pin' a group is also something we are looking at for future releases. We already support a way to do this within the Office apps (you can pin a specific location to the Save As experience) but I think you are asking for something that appears wherever you access a Group (whether it be Outlook, SharePoint or Office) - correct?
Thanks!
Patrick
Angus Hamilton wrote:
Hi
Thanks very much for the clear update - much appreciated.
I'm on Office Insider, so am I right in thinking the experience I am seeing (with Frequent and Following) is what will make it into first release?
Couple of thoughts if that's OK...
1. Frequent is a bit messy and long in my case (35 sites), and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove entries?
2. Could/should following be in alphabetical order?
3. Could there be a favourites/pin facility, as in standard folders?
This is definitely getting there - I can just see it being a bit overwhelming for users as the frequent list fills up, and you can't see the more refined 'following' list without scrolling down...
Thanks
Angus
- To save a document to Teams, open or create a document from one of the Office desktop apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), hit File followed by Save As and choose Sites – Your Company in the menu. In the right column you should see a list of your teams.
Charles Haber here we are FOUR years later and Office 365 desktop apps are still unable to navigate through Office 365 groups. All you can (still) do is browse through classic sites...
And you can't create new folders...
I something thinks I must be missing something because this is a vital bit of functionality that you hit every day. Create new (say) Word document and want to save to a group that you've only just be added to. No way at all. So a simple Save-As operation becomes:
- Save to your desktop
- Close the document
- Open the web browser and navigate to the Office 365 document library folder
- Upload the document
- Open the document again from the web browser
- Switch to your desktop and delete the temporary copy
- Switch back to your document
Seriously???
The alternative is to synchronise the document library. This is a lot better but isn't without it's risk. We're now synchronising documents (and OneDrive sync still breaks) and not opening direct from SharePoint. Version conflict nightmare! Also, my client's have over 1,000 Office 365 groups now. They would have literally hundreds of synchronised document libraries. Imagine when they want to have a clean-up - getting to the list of synchronised libraries is via a horrible, horrible interface. And even then it's not 100% clear or easy to find the library would want to unsync. And on unsyncing, it leaves a copy of the C: drive (!!) and they forget they've stopped synchronising and wonder why their changes aren't been reflected to SharePoint.
And because they are really really scared of unsynchronising wrong and deleting the master copy linked with the horrible interface, they end up raising a support call so the engineer can help them.No wonder my client still hangs on network locations or hankers back to that time when they had a mapped drive and it just, you know, worked...
And don't get me started of editing 3rd party apps like with Acrobat or Photoshop...
This is a big problem when trying to move staff over to Groups. The only way I have been able to get around it (which is not a quick and easy solution) is to "Pin" my groups in the various applications. It took a little time to get all those set up but in the long run works better than the save to desktop and then upload to the group every time.
Check the answers to my post here!
The feature has been made better in the past months and it's currently in Insider Fast ring.
Hi
Thanks for that - and letting me know about the replies on the other post.
I've updated to the insider channel, and they are indeed there, albeit in a slightly (completely) random order :-) Moving in the right direction - let's hope it hits general release sooner rather than later.
In the meantime, may also be worth checking out the Sync'ing of these libraries with OneDrive for Business. In the Fall Creator release of Windows, Files on Demand makes this a more usable solution, as you don't get all the files on your local PC - just those you're working on.
thanks
Angus
I still can't access to modern sites (Both Groups-Teams based and standalone) when saving an office file to SharePoint.
Reading other posts on the subject it seems the feature had some problems and was pushed back to internal builds:
- https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Any-plans-to-save-directly-to-Teams-sites-in-Office-2016-apps/td-p/53198
- https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_officeinsider-mso_win10-msoinsider_excel/please-tell-me-the-groupsharepoint-listing-is/ba61791e-146a-4b3f-8322-ba417a580174
Similar questions on the topic:
- https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/Saving-files-to-SharePoint-Online-is-HARD/td-p/56388
- https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_o365admin-mso_dep365/save-directly-to-an-office-365-outlook-group-files/906f5b02-4b67-41fc-8750-930abfa9dc55
Hope to have feedback from Microsoft at some point... that's quite frustrating!
Hi
Is there any update on this? I've recently presented Office Groups as a means to migrate files from a file share to SharePoint, but the inability to Open or Save As... from Office applications is a showstopper. The only way I can do it is to paste the URL of the group shared documents into explorer when opening/saving a document, which is not ideal.
Something similar to the way you can save to a group in Outlook would be ideal.
- cfiessinger
Microsoft
Charles it's a current limitation we plan to address in the future, please stay tune!Has there been an announcement as when thias will be available? O365 adoption is a bit crippled due to the lack of this feature.
Any new updates on this?
- cfiessingerPlease see this announcement we made last April: https://blogs.office.com/2017/04/24/new-to-office-365-in-april/ under "More Office apps support Office 365 Groups". We are still in the process of rolling this out and addressing customer feedback
