SOLVED

Saving to Groups from Office Desktop Applications

Brass Contributor

So Microsoft Teams led me to discover Office 365 Groups.  The biggest failing, for me is the apparent inability to start a document in Word or Excel and then SaveAs to the Group's file store (unless I have already opened a file from the Group and it's in my recent).  I'm I missing something?

30 Replies

Hello,

 

I wanted to tack onto Christophe's original post about the Groups integration feature within the Office apps (Word, PowerPoint and Excel.) I'm a PM  on the Office team (specifically working on this integration with Groups) and wanted to give everyone a brief update on where we are on the release.

 

We originally targeted releasing this integration (the ability to open from and save Office files to Groups)  more broadly at the beginning of summer (May/June.) Thanks to some initial Insiders feedback, we adjusted the design to include groups that users have followed (as well as the ones that have been frequently used) and updated the file and location picking experience. Along the way, we found a number of issues that needed fixing before we exposed the feature more broadly. 

 

At this point, we've restarted the roll out with the October fork of Office 365, starting with Insiders. Our goal is to get the experience enabled for everyone in the next month or so. 

 

Let us know if you have questions and thank you for your patience as we roll out this feature!

 

Patrick

Angus,

 

Thanks for testing out the feature!

 

The ordering of the Groups in the Frequent list is based on activity within the Group, with more weight being placed on Groups that you have opened and saved files.

 

Hopefully that makes sense with what you are seeing but please let us know if that is not the case.

 

Patrick

Hi

 

Thanks very much for the clear update - much appreciated.

 

I'm on Office Insider, so am I right in thinking the experience I am seeing (with Frequent and Following) is what will make it into first release?

 

Couple of thoughts if that's OK...

1. Frequent is a bit messy and long in my case (35 sites), and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove entries?

2. Could/should following be in alphabetical order?

3. Could there be a favourites/pin facility, as in standard folders?

 

This is definitely getting there - I can just see it being a bit overwhelming for users as the frequent list fills up, and you can't see the more refined 'following' list without scrolling down...

 

Thanks

 

Angus

best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

Angus,

Appreciate the feedback and keep it coming!

The experience you are seeing is what will likely be in the first release. 

To each of your points:

1) We are looking into different ways of making this list a bit easier to manage for future releases. The ability to remove a Group from the list is one of them, as well as supporting ways to filter the list.

2) I'll need to follow up on the ordering of the followed list. I believe it is ordered by when you followed the site on the SharePoint experience...

3) The ability to 'pin' a group is also something we are looking at for future releases. We already support a way to do this within the Office apps (you can pin a specific location to the Save As experience) but I think you are asking for something that appears wherever you access a Group (whether it be Outlook, SharePoint or Office) - correct?

Thanks!

Patrick 


@Angus Hamilton wrote:

Hi

 

Thanks very much for the clear update - much appreciated.

 

I'm on Office Insider, so am I right in thinking the experience I am seeing (with Frequent and Following) is what will make it into first release?

 

Couple of thoughts if that's OK...

1. Frequent is a bit messy and long in my case (35 sites), and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove entries?

2. Could/should following be in alphabetical order?

3. Could there be a favourites/pin facility, as in standard folders?

 

This is definitely getting there - I can just see it being a bit overwhelming for users as the frequent list fills up, and you can't see the more refined 'following' list without scrolling down...

 

Thanks

 

Angus


 

Thank you Finally someone responds who knows what they are talking about. the only documentation anywhere is the original roll out of May, nothing about anything feature being held back or any bugs about this since then. No wonder everyone keeps researching and led here desperately seeking answers to obvious shortcomings in a widely publicised badly pushed Teams feature. I don't see why this wasn't written into the code on day one as its such an obvious requirement. Teams should never have arrived without proper testing first by end users. Like the onedive/skydrive/onedrive buisness/win 10 onedrive saga Microsoft need to start employing people to point out the obvious before anything is released.

Its not good enough to be trying to train staff to use these new features when they aren't complete or keep changing. Onedrive has only recently accepted # in a file name. Seriously? How many years has it been alive now.

Patience shouldn't ever be needed, that's the problem right there. This requirement was obvious to any end user so how did they miss it at the Teams rollout.

Very good news. Thanks for the update.

 

We need a search / filter option on that list. We will have hundreds or thousands of groups.

 

Benoit

Any update on releasing this to the targeted channel?  This seems like a major integration that is missing for end users to embrace Groups and Teams, and it has been a requested feature for a very long time.  

@Eric_H - as we just went to the monthly update channel recently, this would not reach the semi- annual channel until 2019, if that is what you mean by 'targeted' channel. Let me know though if I misunderstood your question....

Between a bad group policy, and not fully understanding the current state of release schedules, I was behind on Office updates. I read up on the new channel naming, grabbed the latest ADMX and switched to monthly release. I now have version 1801 and can see the Groups/sites integration. Thanks!

For anyone searching, there are several levels of release schedules for the Office click-to-run program:
Insider, Monthly Channel Targeted (Insider program), Monthly Channel, Semi-annual Channel Targeted, Semi-Annual Channel.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/changes-to-slow-fast-level-names-for-office-insider-for-win...

@Charles Haber here we are FOUR years later and Office 365 desktop apps are still unable to navigate through Office 365 groups. All you can (still) do is browse through classic sites...

 

And you can't create new folders...

 

I something thinks I must be missing something because this is a vital bit of functionality that you hit every day. Create new (say) Word document and want to save to a group that you've only just be added to. No way at all. So a simple Save-As operation becomes:

 

  1. Save to your desktop
  2. Close the document
  3. Open the web browser and navigate to the Office 365 document library folder
  4. Upload the document
  5. Open the document again from the web browser
  6. Switch to your desktop and delete the temporary copy
  7. Switch back to your document

Seriously???

 

The alternative is to synchronise the document library. This is a lot better but isn't without it's risk. We're now synchronising documents (and OneDrive sync still breaks) and not opening direct from SharePoint. Version conflict nightmare! Also, my client's have over 1,000 Office 365 groups now. They would have literally hundreds of synchronised document libraries. Imagine when they want to have a clean-up - getting to the list of synchronised libraries is via a horrible, horrible interface. And even then it's not 100% clear or easy to find the library would want to unsync. And on unsyncing, it leaves a copy of the C: drive (!!) and they forget they've stopped synchronising and wonder why their changes aren't been reflected to SharePoint.


And because they are really really scared of unsynchronising wrong and deleting the master copy linked with the horrible interface, they end up raising a support call so the engineer can help them.

 

No wonder my client still hangs on network locations or hankers back to that time when they had a mapped drive and it just, you know, worked...

 

And don't get me started of editing 3rd party apps like with Acrobat or Photoshop...

To save a document to Teams, open or create a document from one of the Office desktop apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), hit File followed by Save As and choose Sites – Your Company in the menu. In the right column you should see a list of your teams.