OneDrive Office Hours | December 2025
Join the OneDrive product team live each month on our monthly OneDrive Customer Office Hours to hear what's top of mind, get insights into roadmap updates, and dig into a special topic. Each call includes live Q&A where you'll have a chance to ask the OneDrive product team any question about OneDrive - The home of your files.
SharePoint sync issues when opening from File Explorer
Hi there, Some users in my company are having issues with files not syncing with SharePoint when they save them and are also unable to concurrently edit files. They open the files via File Explorer and the 'autosave' functionality is disabled. Enabling autosave prompts them to save as a new copy. These users have recently switched to a new laptop running Windows 11 (previous laptop was Windows 10) and had no sync issues when using the old laptop. If the user first opens Excel/Word and then uses the File menu to open the document then the autosave is enabled and the file syncs with SharePoint. Here are some of the troubleshooting steps I've tried: stopping the sync and starting it again unlinking the pc and re-syncing the SharePoint site uninstalling and re-installing OneDrive Has anyone come across this issue or know of a fix that I haven't tried yet? Regards, Steve
Force OneDrive/Excel to return the local file path instead of a cloud URL
Hello, I have all my 3D models stored in a OneDrive-synced folder, including the Excel file that controls many of the model parameters. I work on three different PCs, so using OneDrive for synchronization would be ideal. However, my modeling software Solid Edge runs into a specific issue: it does find the linked Excel file in the OneDrive-synced folder and attempts to open it, but as soon as it tries to read the parameters, it gets stuck in an endless loop. The reason is that Excel no longer provides a normal local Windows file path for the workbook—even though the file is fully available offline. Instead, Excel exposes the OneDrive/SharePoint URL, and Solid Edge cannot process this URL, which causes the loop. What I have tried so far: Enabled “Keep files on this device” for the entire project folder Completely shut down OneDrive (disabled it and killed all OneDrive processes in Task Manager) Tried changing the stored Excel path inside Solid Edge from a local path to the OneDrive URL — Solid Edge does not accept URLs as valid paths None of these attempts solved the issue. If anyone has a reliable method to make Solid Edge read a OneDrive-synced Excel file as a local file path, I would really appreciate your help.
OneDrive speed problems. Symlinks?
I'm having problems with slow syncing my local OneDrive folder to my online OneDrive. I recently added about 40K symlinks to my folder and I'm suspecting that could be the cause. But NONE of my symlinks are pointing to network files. They all point to local files in my local OneDrive folder. I just want to sync the symlink files themselves, not the files the symlinks point to. Those files will be synced separately since they are in the same tree. I have about 85K files in my OneDrive and, as I said, about 40K of those are symlinks. OneDrive has been syncing for 2 days now and it still says there are 82K files remaining. It's only syncing about 100 files per hour. I'm pretty sure it's the symlinks that are making it go so slow. Before I created all the symlinks, syncing used to be pretty quick. Alternatively, is there a way to tell OneDrive to just ignore symlinks? I only need them in my local OneDrive folder tree and I don't need them online in OneDrive. I'm the only user of the files. If I don't get a good solution from someone here, I'm going to try writing a program that moves all my symlinks to a temp folder tree outside OneDrive, finish sync'ing the real files, and then move the symlinks back to their original location. But this is risky and I'm worried about corruption. Why didn't Microsoft give us an easy option to ignore symlinks? :-(Has Your Organization Set Up a Viva Engage Community for Microsoft 365 Collaboration?
Hi everyone! As a trainer, I often get great questions during my Microsoft 365 sessions. While I share answers live, only the attendees benefit—leaving many others without that valuable info. I’ve already set up a Microsoft Learning Pathways SharePoint site as a resource, but I’m exploring ways to extend knowledge-sharing beyond the classroom.Has anyone created or participated in a Viva Engage community to share tips, answer questions, and collaborate around daily Microsoft 365 tools? I’d love to hear about your experiences, best practices, or ideas on how to maximize impact and reach across your organizations. Thanks in advance for sharing! Let’s empower everyone to get more from Microsoft 365.😃
Documents uploading to Sharepoint althoughI didn't set it up
Yesterday I began receiving email updates telling me that the Word documents I was working on have been uploaded to Sharepoint. This happens every time I insert a comment into the file. This only began to happen yesterday. I have never used Sharepoint, and only learned about the "Share" option when I searched Help to find ways to turn it off. I didn't turn it on deliberately. So I googled for instructions on how to stop this, and none of the instructions I found matched what I saw when I tried to turn it off in either the document or FIle Explorer. I just went into Word and clicked Help to identify the version I'm using, but they removed "About Word" from the Help menu, so the version isn't where it belongs anymore. I don't know where they put it, and it might not matter anyway. It's probably the latest version, in fact, this might have happened with a recent upgrade, I don't know. If my documents upload to Sharepoint, they're private, right? I'm a writer and I don't want my stuff going out there without me controlling things. Where does Sharepoint keep my files? I no longer have access to OneDrive because I was shut out one day when when my internet carrier switched my signal to another city, and I clicked "No" when Microsoft asked me if I was the one signing in from that city. They immediately locked me out of everything. I can't even get codes by text anymore. I got Outlook and microsoft.com back by signing in with my thumbprint on my phone, but it didn't help me with OneDrive, and I couldn't get support, so I've been unable to access it for months. If Sharepoint is happening on OneDrive, I might be in trouble. How do I stop uploading files to Sharepoint, and stop these annoying emails whenever I add a comment to a file? Thanks!
