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 make an edit, the edit is auto-saved, and close the new tab. Or, they don't need to make any edits, just needed to view, so they close the tab.
2) In the original tab, they attempt to add metadata, or delete the file, but are told the file is locked. It then needs to time out before anyone can make edits to the file, and there doesn't appear to be any way to release the lock manually.
The file would not be locked if the user refreshed the document library page after closing the additional tab, but this is not realistic to expect the user to know to do to avoid locks.
I would like such documents to open in the same tab so the user would have to trigger a refresh when returning to the library. As far as I can tell this is not an option in settings - is this true? Is Microsoft aware of this bug? It is causing untold issues.
40 Replies
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.
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.
- I 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.
This happens to us as well in SPO. I've searched for a lot of solutions but, no. nothing that you could reply to a user of your site to say 'File is fixed'!
One solution offered was wait, 10 to 30 min. (try telling that to an annoyed user!!)
it works the odd time.But i have had some cases last 24hrs before the lock finally went away. (even after a user restarted and went home for the day!)
A menu item for admins to unlock 'short term' locks would be useful!
Edit**
forgot to include this!:
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/93965/Force-SharePoint-Document-Unlocked-Checked-In
seems like they had something for on-premise SP so there is a slim hope they have something similar for SPO
We've also been experiencing this problem more and more, where a users closes a document and then tries to move, rename or delete it and it says it's locked.
Presumably it thinks it's still open somewhere so it's being held in the browser memory, and the only way to fix it is to come back to it the next day!
I have logged a service request with MS about this so they are looking in to it.
- ANy resolutions? I have run into the same issue, over a yer later 😞
Bumping this because I would love to hear from anyone else experiencing this problem. We can't be the only one?
