MS Office syncing across devices

[tinpanalley]

I have never understood this and the desire to leave Google products has me having to figure it out again, but I'm stuck..

 

Is there no functionality for free in Online Office products like with Google Docs where you can pop in or out of a document or spreadsheet and have access to a file at the same time on different devices in MS Office online or MS365? It seems documents in Office will frequently tell me there is a sync issue and asks if I want to save a different version of the file? But I don't want different versions floating on different devices. I don't get why MS can't get this right. Or is it me doing something wrong?

 

Is there some other free office suite that can do this well?

[johnt]

The problem is MS. You can usually get around it by being patient and forcing documents to synchronize with OneDrive before shifting devices. The free versions operate similarly to the paid. The paid just gives you more storage. There are no improvements to speed or functionality of their cloud. 

[manikyath]

if your document exists in onedrive, you should have synchronized editing same as google docs.

 

if you have a sync issue, that is because someone has that feature turned off, because then M365 falls back to "check out and update" like the old days.

[tinpanalley]

1 hour ago, johnt said:

The problem is MS. You can usually get around it by being patient and forcing documents to synchronize with OneDrive before shifting devices. 

Yeah, teh stop syncing, resync is getting really old especially when you're out with your phone, you HAVE to edit something, and MS tells you you have to just edit a backup version. I hate that Google does this flawlessly but they do. I need to see if another online office suite can handle this.

19 minutes ago, manikyath said:

if your document exists in onedrive, you should have synchronized editing same as google docs.

 

Wait, is the problem here then that the stuff I'm trying to sync from one device to the other is stuff that lives on the onedrive folder and that that folder is also on my desktop? (...getting more confused...) Or does that have nothing to do with it? Would this happen is we only synced to the MS365 cloud and not to our desktop?

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, tinpanalley said:

 

Wait, is the problem here then that the stuff I'm trying to sync from one device to the other is stuff that lives on the onedrive folder and that that folder is also on my desktop? (...getting more confused...) Or does that have nothing to do with it? Would this happen is we only synced to the MS365 cloud and not to our desktop?

onedrive syncs (if enabled) to your desktop, or (if enabled) syncs your entire suer folder to M365. either way, if it exists in onedrive and is in an activelty synced folder, it should work. for shared editing all that matters is that the document is in a location that is "actively connected" to onedrive, and that you have automatic sync ON in your office application if using the desktop version.

[tinpanalley]

2 hours ago, manikyath said:

onedrive syncs (if enabled) to your desktop, or (if enabled) syncs your entire suer folder to M365. either way, if it exists in onedrive and is in an activelty synced folder, it should work. for shared editing all that matters is that the document is in a location that is "actively connected" to onedrive, and that you have automatic sync ON in your office application if using the desktop version.

Sync is definitely on. I do run a VPN, but I have split tunneling enabled so that only two programs use it. The rest of all of Windows runs on my regular ISP address. So that's probably not the issue.