Any plans to save directly to Teams sites in Office 2016 apps?

[Ed Hansberry]

In current office apps like PowerPoint, Word,  and Excel, if we click File|Save As, if I go to our Team Site (not a teams site, but the default sharepoint created for each tenant), I can then browse all "sites and workspaces" and save files directly where they belong, but it only shows Sharepoint sites, not Group sites and therefore, not Team locations.

So we are saving files to our desktop then uploading to Teams. A round about way of doing it.

This is mainly an issue when we get files from email or create new in various office apps, especially PPTs which always come from Templates we have.

It would be nice if we could save them straight to Teams regardless of whether or not that team or any channel in that team is sync'd to our hard drive. 

[#2]

I recall that we had last year some discussions about having the ability to save files in Group sites and I really thought this was already done, but it seems that's not the case at least in production @Christophe Fiessinger can you light us here

[#3]

That is fantastic news that it is at least on someone's radar

In Outlook, you can save attachments to the group's root, but that should be prohibited as Teams cannot see those files. Hoping that only allows saving to folders off the root (i.e. channels)

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Yes this is something we are working on, stay tune for more details.

[#5]

I agree have started to use teams more and more and right now you first need to save to one location and then drag and drop to the team to get the file there.

One more thing. It would be nice to have the possibility to drag and drop an attachment from Outlook directly to the team folder as well.

BR

Dag

[#6]

FWIW this feature is now available in the Fast Ring build of Office apps for Excel, Word, and PowerPOint. 

Outlook still saves files to the ROOT of the Team/Group, which means the Teams app cannot see it.

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[#7]

Is there any update on this? 

I know you can save directly to Teams channels/folders in sharepoint from Office 2016 by typing in the path i.e. //tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/teamname , but this is a manual faff. I can't find a way of adding the team/group folder as default. It always goes to the default tenant sharepoint area.

[#8]

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@Steve Thacker wrote:

Is there any update on this? 

I know you can save directly to Teams channels/folders in sharepoint from Office 2016 by typing in the path i.e. //tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/teamname , but this is a manual faff. I can't find a way of adding the team/group folder as default. It always goes to the default tenant sharepoint area.

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They are contining to fiddle with it. It works well in the latest Fast Ring build of Office 365 apps, but in the last month, most "groups" (and therefore teams) vanished and only pure Sharepoint sites showed up. Then they all came back. Then a few days ago only my favorites were there, but today it looks like most if not all are back. 

So it seems MS is messing with the code on their side that returns the group list to you. No clue when they will roll this out to the slow ring (current channel), but I too hope it is soon. It is insanely handy.

[#9]

I wonder if the following can be a workaround: I have synced my Teams files, as stored in SharePoint, to my PC. In that way I have a copy of the files even when I am offline. This creates a SharePoint folder in my file system, very much like OneDrive. If I choose, I can save to this folder on my computer and it will be available in Teams as well. It is actually quite nice, because you can quickly move a lot of files to your Teams' Channels, using your file explorer.

[#10]

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@Marius Pretorius wrote:
I wonder if the following can be a workaround: I have synced my Teams files, as stored in SharePoint, to my PC. In that way I have a copy of the files even when I am offline. This creates a SharePoint folder in my file system, very much like OneDrive. If I choose, I can save to this folder on my computer and it will be available in Teams as well. It is actually quite nice, because you can quickly move a lot of files to your Teams' Channels, using your file explorer.

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That will let you save to specific team sites, but we have dozens, hundreds of channels, and hundreds of Gigs of files. I do sync my key sites to my PC so I have offline access, but at least 80%-90% are not sync'd, so a direct way to save and open files from within Office apps is critical without being forced to use the Teams UI or the Sharepoint UI.

[#11]

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@Ed Hansberry wrote:

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Outlook still saves files to the ROOT of the Team/Group, which means the Teams app cannot see it.

FYI disallowing save of files to the ROOT is *NOT* a good idea. Not all users access files through MS Teams. If you go directly to OneDrive or if you use Outlook Groups then putting things in the root makes perfect sense. Please do NOT disallow saving files to the root of the team/group onedrive folder.

[#12]

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@Peter Bowers wrote:

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@Ed Hansberry wrote:

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Outlook still saves files to the ROOT of the Team/Group, which means the Teams app cannot see it.

FYI disallowing save of files to the ROOT is *NOT* a good idea. Not all users access files through MS Teams. If you go directly to OneDrive or if you use Outlook Groups then putting things in the root makes perfect sense. Please do NOT disallow saving files to the root of the team/group onedrive folder.

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I can see that, but putting them in ROOT is a train wreck for Teams users. So perhaps this could be at least a tenant setting, or a group setting, and if a group setting, something that the creation of a Team from the Teams app would disable by default.

[#13]

Any update on this? It seems something that will be key for adoption of Teams, but it's been a couple of months, and work-arounds such as pasting in the URL of the documents site or waiting for files-on-demand aren't really workable.

thanks

Angus

[#14]

No, but my understanding is it is coming.

Right now, Office Fast Ring doesn't allow it but it will in the next fast release build, again. It is pretty good when it works. Since they have said it is coming back to fast ring, that tells me it is still moving forward. But who knows when it will see GA.

[#15]

For anyone who is curious about how to get the "Fast Ring" releases of Office, you can follow the instructions here.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3185078/how-to-switch-from-deferred-channel-to-current-chan...

[#16]

When I give my workshops about Teams, this is a essential feature that is missing for users to change their habbits. Now they need to save to their computer and then copy it a teams enviromnent. Really looking forward to a solution. 

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[#17]

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@Deleted wrote:

When I give my workshops about Teams, this is a essential feature that is missing for users to change their habbits. Now they need to save to their computer and then copy it a teams enviromnent. Really looking forward to a solution. 

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This feature exists in the current Fast Ring build of Office, but it unfortunately lets you save to the root of the team in the Documents folder, which is invisible to Teams. I wish there was a way to block that in the Admin panel so it forced you to save in the existing folders/channels.

That small issue aside though, it works pretty well. Just train them to to save to the Documents folder.

[#18]

Hi Ed,

Thanks for the fast reply. I installed the current fast ring build of office.

If I understood you correctly you can save from Word to the Root folder of the Team but this is not advised as it is invisible to Teams.

Can you explain to me how that you exactly to this?

Do you have any idea when MS will come up with a solution?

Thans and have a nice weekend.

Roel

[#19]

Perhaps 'invisible' is a bit of a strong word here, you can add a tab to see all of the files in a team site, or add Cloud storage to the Teams files to point back at the root. I think the point is that neither of these are especially intuitive.
For me, I think the 'general' groups in any team should store it's file in the root anyway, then the problem goes away.

[#20]

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@Steven Collier wrote:
Perhaps 'invisible' is a bit of a strong word here, you can add a tab to see all of the files in a team site, or add Cloud storage to the Teams files to point back at the root. I think the point is that neither of these are especially intuitive.
For me, I think the 'general' groups in any team should store it's file in the root anyway, then the problem goes away.

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That is confusing though, having a Sharepoint storage to the root of the team. 

Having General storing in the root will also cause a problem as the root has the other channels, so the channels are available from two places, general, and the channel itself. Again, confusing.