Forum Discussion
"Error:The file is locked" when using Office Online within SharePoint Online
At a current client I am seeing this scenario play out often: 1) User clicks on an Office document in a SPO document library, and it opens in a new tab in the associated Office Online app. They m...
For what it's worth, Microsoft has acknowledged this was an issue and claims to have resolved it. In my preliminary tests, it does seem to be resolved. Fingers crossed it continues to be!
"This issue was posted to the Service Health Dashboard (SHD) as incident SP146930 starting at Aug 21 2018 3:52 PM (UTC). The user experience of this incident is : Users were unable to move or delete Microsoft Word documents.
Now, Service Health Dashboard has indicated that issue SP146930 has been resolved as of: Wednesday, August 22, 2018, at 3:26 PM UTC. If you are still experiencing an issue, please post a new thread on our forum."
I have seen this issue, albeit rarely, so I've never seen it as enough of an issue to raise it formally with Microsoft. The conditions under which I saw this was when a document was created in Word Online, i.e. someone just clicked New Word Document in a document library, and then tried to open it in Microsoft Word.
The lock persists for approx 10 minutes, so I usually advise my users that it's time for a coffee break and when they come back it's unlocked again. Not really a fix, just an observation from encountering the same issue.