Saving to Groups from Office Desktop Applications

[Charles Haber]

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?

[#2]

Charles it's a current limitation we plan to address in the future, please stay tune!

[#3]

Any new updates on this?

[#4]

Please see this announcement we made last April: https://blogs.office.com/2017/04/24/new-to-office-365-in-april/ under "More Office apps support Office 365 Groups". We are still in the process of rolling this out and addressing customer feedback

[#5]

Thank you, I found that link right after I posted. It's still an issue for me though. It looks like from the screenshot in the blog that it only shows "Frequented Sites". The groups I want to save to are not "Frequent Sites" and I don't know how to make them "Frequent". I am on the latest build (well, I should say I'm on "Current Channel" and it says I have the latest update.

[#6]

Any update on this, Trying to get staff to move to groups but without this feature the system is compromised. Seriuosly waiting in earnest for this ability

[#7]

Hi

Is there any update on this? I've recently presented Office Groups as a means to migrate files from a file share to SharePoint, but the inability to Open or Save As... from Office applications is a showstopper. The only way I can do it is to paste the URL of the group shared documents into explorer when opening/saving a document, which is not ideal.

Something similar to the way you can save to a group in Outlook would be ideal.

[#8]

Hello Mr. Fiessinger,

are there any updates on this subject? We're also waiting for the feature, but it doesn't seem to be rolled out yet.

Can you confirm this by any chance?

Tanks and regards

[#9]

Has there been an announcement as when thias will be available? O365 adoption is a bit crippled due to the lack of this feature. 

[#10]

Announced in April: "...Groups integration in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Windows desktops is coming with this month’s Office 365 updates..."

we are almost in October and still nothing...

[#11]

Hi

I've come across a similar post (related to Teams, but the same issue) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Any-plans-to-save-directly-to-Teams-sites-in-...

This suggests something has been in and out of the first release version of Office.

Is there a definitive update on when this is coming? Given the recent Skype for Business -> Teams announcements I'd really like to adopt Teams, but our users can't save files easily to the teams/group file location so I can't recommend it.

[#12]

I have the same issue not being able to save documents to a group, especially from non-microsoft apps.

[#13]

In Word/Excel/Ppt you can File ... Save As and choose from Sites (when you say save to groups, you mean save to a site associated with the group).

For non-Microsoft apps you'll need to sync the site to your machine.

[#14]

Hi

Thanks for the reply - however, the issue is that the Sites section in Office apps doesn't show/easily allow navigation to Office 365 group sites (unless I'm missing something). The only thing I see in Sites is our main SharePoint site, and any sites I've previously saved to.

So if I want to save to a new Office 365 Group site, I need to type in https://mydomain.sharepoint.com/sites/groupsitename and then navigate from there? This isn't very user friendly for 'ordinary' users - it would be much more preferable to have a list of groups to choose from (a little like the Outlook functionality for saving attachments)

[#15]

I get groups show up in that list, but yes its based on sites you use regularly rather than those which you are aa member.

[#16]

Interesting - the only way I get groups to appear in the list is to have typed the URL in there at least once. (e.g. mytenant.sharepoint.com/groupname/documents).

That's the bit my users struggle with - they really need a simple list of groups such as you get in Outlook when saving to a group (if only you could save to a sub-folder, but that's another story!!).

[#17]

I still can't access to modern sites (Both Groups-Teams based and standalone) when saving an office file to SharePoint.

Reading other posts on the subject it seems the feature had some problems and was pushed back to internal builds:

• https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams/Any-plans-to-save-directly-to-Teams-sites-in-...
• https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_officeinsider-mso_win10-msoinsider_excel...

Similar questions on the topic:

• https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/Saving-files-to-SharePoint-Online-is-HARD/td-p/563...
• https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_o365admin-mso_dep365/save-directly-to-an...

Hope to have feedback from Microsoft at some point... that's quite frustrating!

[#18]

This is a big problem when trying to move staff over to Groups.   The only way I have been able to get around it (which is not a quick and easy solution) is to "Pin" my groups in the various applications.   It took a little time to get all those set up but in the long run works better than the save to desktop and then upload to the group every time.  

[#19]

Check the answers to my post here!

The feature has been made better in the past months and it's currently in Insider Fast ring.

[#20]

Hi

Thanks for that - and letting me know about the replies on the other post.

I've updated to the insider channel, and they are indeed there, albeit in a slightly (completely) random order 🙂 Moving in the right direction - let's hope it hits general release sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, may also be worth checking out the Sync'ing of these libraries with OneDrive for Business. In the Fall Creator release of Windows, Files on Demand makes this a more usable solution, as you don't get all the files on your local PC - just those you're working on.

thanks

Angus