Limits to number of co-authors

[Matt McNabb]

Is there any published information regarding limits to co-authoring in Office Online? I've received some reports that Excel sheets were nearly unusable when the number of co-authors went above 10. I've personally never edited with this many authors, but I can't find any documentation with any hard limits around this.

Thanks!

[#2]

Microsoft has said hundreds, somewhere I had a post I'll go search for it. But I think it's one of those things where if you have one bad apple in the bunch it can cause issues. Also are they all using web browser or mix of Clients as well?

[#3]

Ok, So, recommended is no more than 10, but the maxium is 99 :P, so I guess your experience is on par with expectations. Reference here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/install/software-boundaries-and-limits

"Recommended maximum number of concurrent editors is 10. The boundary is 99.
If there are 99 co-authors who have a single document opened for concurrent editing, each successive user sees a "File in use" error, and can only open a read-only copy.
More than 10 co-editors will lead to a gradually degraded user experience with more conflicts, and users might have to go through more iterations to successfully upload their changes to the server. "

[#4]

Since that article applies to Sharepoint 2013, do you think it is relevant here? It could be that co-authoring limits are the same across products, but I'm not certain of this.

And the users in question were either using Office Online embedded in Teams, or using Office Online directly. We don't currently support the Office 365 Pro Plus deployments, and our Office client applications are not signed in to Office 365.

[#5 · Accepted solution]

2016 is 10 as well before degradation. So I mean it lines up with experience your having so I would think it's pretty much 10 as well for Online.

[#6]

And keep in mind that Excel has always been a little... special when it comes to co-authoring.

[#7]

apologies for dragging up an old post.. 

probably noteworthy that that the specific recommendation relating to Co-authoring doesn't include XLSX . 

"Coauthoring in Word and PowerPoint for .docx, .pptx and .ppsx files "

Though I recall (perhaps I'm mistaken) that at one point Co-authoring was NOT supported in Excel (unless the spreadsheet was a "shared workbook")

I understood that co-authoring is now possible in Excel and has been for some time. However, I've recently heard people mentioning that they've struggled with co-authoring in Excel and people asking is co-authoring supported in Excel.

I assume that there aren't issues if co-authors/collaborators are both using Excel Online?

I'd suspect that "Open in Excel" is used more than "Open in <any other Office tools>" because the experience is better (or there are features of the worksheet that are unsupported in Online) .

Are , or rather WERE the issues with co-authoring in Excel , likely to be related to the older OneDrive Groove.exe sync client? i.e. the changes made locally were not being synchronised with the Online copy and therefore not synchronising with other co-authors? (One would assume that this will have improved therefore with the wider adoption new gen sync client) 

[#8]

Sync client is irrelevant to co-authoring. The problem with Excel usually is the version of Excel, it's just become recently available to co-author and many people don't have the newer version to do so. This article used to say what version, but usually I say if you have the Auto save icon in the top left, then you can coauthor, otherwise you most likely need to update.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Collaborate-on-Excel-workbooks-at-the-same-time-with-co-aut...

[#9]

Thanks @Chris Webb good to know.

When you say recently.. ball park are we talking the last year or is it available for longer than that?

Cheers.

[#10]

Depends on the release settings. The auto save just started rolling out a few months ago to the Semi-Annual ring.