Limitations of OneDrive Excel

Brass Contributor

Hi All,
Thanks in advance, we have a query from one of our directors that OneDrive Excel(Office365) has below mentioned limitations:
Lost updates due to concurrency
Updates done by one person not reflected to othersr.
Too much time in opening the file when multiple people try to access it (even with see your own view or everyone's view)
Local sync of onedrive folder

Is there anyway where we can address these issues?? Or would Excel on Sharepoint or Teams be better??
Their requirement is "updated by multiple people (~20 concurrent users) at the same time in OneDrive Excel sheets and view in different pivots."

2 Replies
One of the issues we've noticed that causes inaccurate file conflicts is when the OneDrive Sync client is stuck in a loop of syncing locally cached files on the pc. If you have Files on-demand turned on, any file that is opened or is selected to be 'keep on this device' will keep the OneDrive Sync client constantly busy, as it makes sure the latest version of that file is saved locally on the pc. So that means when the director clicks save on the excel file, there's a delay in the OneDrive Sync client updating the excel file in the cloud, in the meantime anyone else saving the file through co-authoring will have their version of the file synced before your director and hence the director will see a file conflict.
To fix this issue, open file explorer and right click on the OneDrive root folder and select 'free up space' you can do this for synced document libraries too. Free up space just removed the locally cached files and makes them cloud-omly. For a long term solution, look into setting up storage sense, comes part of Windows 10 1809 +. Set it up to clear locally cached files that have not been accessed prior to a set number of days.
You will need to apply the above fix for all members engaged in co-authoring.
HTH

You cannot expect a browser application to have the same functionality as full-fledged desktop client, despite the development trends in the past few years. In particular to Excel, here's a list of major differences: https://support.office.microsoft.com/en-us/article/Differences-between-using-a-workbook-in-the-brows...