List view threshold affecting autosave excel document's in co-authoring mode

[Elvar Aðalgeirsson]

Hi all,

Wanted to hear from the community how you are handling document libraries with more than 5.000 items. I just closed a support ticket with Microsoft in regards of co-authoring not saving all changes.

According to Microsoft support document libraries with more than 5.000 items are not supported, meaning for example co-authoring feature might not work as expected. In our case some users are reporting missing lines in an excel document (data loss), these documents are actively being edited and, in many cases, edited by more than one person at the same time. All users report Autosave is on and "Saved to sharepoint" works, however next time they work on the document their previous work is missing and version history does not reveal their changes.

Microsoft support claims this behavior to be expected due to 5.000 item limit in sharepoint online backend. this particular document library contains 80.000 items and has already been cleaned up as much as possible.

Does anyone experience the same / similar issue and has a solution that does not make features like co-authoring stop working. Microsoft recommends splitting this document library down to around 100 document libraries, I fear that will affect daily work routines for end users.

Any advice appreciated.

[#2]

Hello @Elvar Aðalgeirsson,

We had a similar issue and it was the result of the workbook size being too large. The File size limits for workbooks in SharePoint Online article explains it in more detail. I believe our end users were able to co-author using the Excel client.

I hope this helps.

Norm

[#3]

@Elvar Aðalgeirssonthe library should have automatically created indexes which should help prevent these types of issues. You should check those and add some more indexes to see if that provides any improvements. I would also check the versions of the desktop versions that the users have and ensure that they are upgraded consistently.