My small company has Office 365 for business, with OneDrive Business 365. This allows documents to be simultaneously edited using the online versions of Office. Members of the company, and supposedly, outside company members as well can also edit the document. Company members can edit using the online, or desktop versions of MS Word.
Inter-company invitees do NOT appear to be able to view or edit the document using DESKTOP Word, only the entirely tragic and woeful inadequate "online" version of Word. (This is a complex specification document, and Online Word in a word is a "joke". It is entirely not up to the task.
But it appears that neither is the desktop version of Word.
I have two problems with Desktop Word in this case (where BOTH companies have OneDrive business (or better) [amusingly, one of the companies is Microsoft]).
First, I cannot share for Desktop application use between an explicit invitee (not using a Guest invitation, but rather an explicit Direct document invitation), for desktop application Word editing.) This simply DOES NOT WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The ONLINE version of Word works just fine, its just useless.
Second, intra-company (e.g., just in side MY company), if multiple users are editing a the same time, the response from the product is UNBELIEVABLY slow. (As it it goes away for 5secs, 10 secs, 20 secs, 5 minutes). Some saves take 30 minutes. 30 MINUTES because one did a global operation on the document. (This document is large, but not that large, 50 pages, with a lot of sections.)
Third, sometimes, when I am the ONLY person editing the document (you can see that in desktop Word 365), that one is the ONLY person in the document, and I do even a small edit, and it writes it back (taking 30 seconds or more), but then after changing from "Saving" to "Saved", the Cursor STILL does not return (its the spinning circle e.g., the HOUR-GLASS, for old-timers like me) and the application NEVER comes back, EVER. You have to KILL IT, and then reopen the document, which is fine because it was in the "Saved" state, but the application simply DIES. ALL OF THE TIME.
I have never seen a Word processing program, especially one as EXPENSIVE as Microsoft Word is, malfunction so badly, blatantly, and perform so horrendously.
Does Microsoft EVEN TEST this stuff. I mean this is BASIC stuff. Converting some H2 headers to "Normal" style (e.g., "Body style"- with formatting, is NOT a complex operation, that Word should be crashing like this. Or is the problem that OneDrive hosting from "xx.onmicrosoft.com" (e.g. Microsoft Azure) is so bad, that this basic functionality simply DOES NOT WORK.
I WOULD BE EMBARRASSED that this does not work if I worked for Microsoft. They should literally be ashamed of themselves for putting out a product that so clearly MISSES on all cylinders, something so bad as to be ENTIRELY unusable.
Waiting for the "Next Day" online tools update that "FIXES" this stuff, including no problem downloading a new DESKTOP application update. But it needs FIXING. Why would ANYONE pay for this stuff? I cannot believe my company is paying for it, so that we can supposedly do SHARED file editing and review on a specification, pretty much the SOLE reason to rent hosted 365 applications, and OneDrive for Business.
Regards,
David O'Shea
Email address removed
UNHAPPY 365 User
