Forum Discussion
Learn How OneDrive Sync Works With Office 2016
One thing you'll be disappointed to learn Daniel TSHIN is that unless something has changed since I posted this above several months ago, we've found that even when files are sync'd locally on your PC, Office will still open the file from OneDrive/SharePoint/Internet. So in the cases where you are in a poorly connected location, you wait a long time for it to open and close/save.
We've never been able to get an answer on why it behaves this way - we had hoped that it would be more like Outlook & cached mode.
Hi Adrian Hyde, this is not we're experiencing.
Generally OneDrive NGSC behaves as expected for most of my users.
Today I experienced the opposite of what you're saying.
One group of users quarterly creates a document (for board of directors) where many people contribute to. Unfortunately this Word documents gets rather large very quickly, > 100MB due to a lot of images over 100 - 200 pages.
Word Online can no longer open this document size, and users rely heavily on Word 2016 with OneDrive NGSC to sync changes to file. With Automatic AutoSave you can quickly expect OneDrive NGSC to fail, as 5-10 users constantly upload and download over 100mb with that document.
I'm currently in a situation, where the CEO cannot open the Online Version of that file, and Word 2016 constantly opens some cached version that has a few merging errors. I've tried to delete everything offline from that document library, but Word still does not open the proper (most up to date) online version.
Ivan54- my description wasn't clear...
What I mean is if you open the desktop version of Word (for example), and then open a file on your OneDrive - instead of using the version that is already cached on your PC - it will connect to the internet and download the file from OneDrive.
We can see that behavior in Fiddler traces.
We have many users in poorly connected locations, and would prefer to let the sync tool handle the upload/download behind the scenes as much as possible and let the users have the performance experience of working with the locally stored file.
Sorry for reopening an old discussion but I think this is something that we are experiencing also.
From the original post, I expected documents to be opened from the local synced copy but it appears that it opens them from the web which of course takes a lot longer on slower connections.
We can go to file explorer and then open from there (which is quick) and the "recent documents" in Word then show as c:-users-user-OneDrive. Again, opening that recent document is quick.
However, if we go to "recent documents" in Word and open from the connected OneDrive service, it seems much slower which I presume is because it takes it from the online storage rather than the synced local copy.
My expectation was that it would know that a copy was synced and so it would always take it from the local copy - is this not true?
Hello Richard Rodgers -
Yes -we'd proven a while ago that this original article from Stephen Rose was not correct...especially this part:
Office files always open from the locally synced file first
We've opened several premier cases who also confirmed the default behavior is that the client will always check the online file first...which really sucks when the network connection is horrible.
But at least there is some potential good news, if you have seen MC172851 - there is an upcoming change for PPT and Word.
We are looking forward to this working on all the Office apps.
New feature: Changes to PowerPoint and Word to open files fasterWe’re excited to release a new change to make documents saved to OneDrive and SharePoint open faster. We’ll be rolling this change out soon. Rather than always checking for updates for cloud files prior to opening, Word and PowerPoint will open any existing version on the user’s device and then sync updates immediately afterwards. This is already the behavior today for files saved to local OneDrive and SharePoint sync folders. This change introduces this behavior for files that are stored on... More ...
- Oh, yes you mean if you select Open from OneDrive/SharePoint, then yes it will open the web version. You'd actually have select the file from the Explorer Window to get the cached version. Now it Office would understand that there is a cached version of this, loading times would definitely improve.
