Forum Discussion
snyderdavida
Aug 13, 2018Brass Contributor
"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...
Forrest_H
Aug 28, 2018Steel Contributor
It is not just you. We have issues like this a couple of times a month. Sometimes it happens when users are just updating the metadata properties and not the content of the file. However, if the user has the file open in Word Online in one tab and the same user tries to edit the metadata of the same file in another tab, it reports the file is locked for editing by the same user. If they close everything down and try again to edit metadata without opening in Word it will still give them lock error. One way we have had success in releasing the locks is to have another user open the file using the Desktop version of Word and without doing anything but close again, the lock becomes freed, allowing the original user to edit the metadata.
Egle Ambraziuniene
Aug 29, 2018Copper Contributor
We have the same issues and did not really find a way to release this lock. Sometimes user just have to wait more than several hours to release this document lock. We have tried to enable check-in and run check-out/check-in cycles on the locked document and sometimes this helps, sometimes the document just stays locked.
- Michael ButterfieldAug 30, 2018Iron ContributorI made a service request to Microsoft about this issue and they seemed to have fixed it, at least for us!
Files are no longer getting locked, and if they do a simple refresh of the page fixes it straight away.