Forum Discussion
Document Library Settings
Many times when someone opens a document from a teams document library, it shows the document as modified even though no actual changes were made to the document. The default at my company is that documents open in edit mode and they auto save so one solution would be to set it to open in view only mode, but my company doesn't want to change that at the company wide level. Is there any way to do this at the SharePoint library level? I also don't want to make document checkout mandatory.
1 Reply
This behavior is expected when documents open in Edit mode with AutoSave on. Even opening a file can update metadata (like “Modified” and “Modified By”) without visible content changes.
You can’t force “Open in View mode” at the SharePoint library level while keeping company-wide defaults unchanged. The “open in edit vs view” behavior is controlled by:
The Office app default (desktop/web)
User-level settings
Tenant-level policies (admin controlled)
There isn’t a per-library toggle that overrides this without affecting broader settings.
Perhaps you can just keep version history on and the users can revert to the original version?
