Microsoft Office should indicate when a file is being edited by another user

Author: SailRealCreated Apr 27, 2023Updated Sep 11, 2026
Labelsstate:stale

Please agree to the following

Summary

As a second editor, I would like to receive a warning when accessing a Microsoft Office file at the same time.

Motivation

When I open a Microsoft Office file, I want it to recognise that someone else is working on it, because some clouds and some protocols like SMB support this.

Considered Alternatives

No response

Anything else?

When editing a file, Microsoft Word creates an owner file, e.g. ~$Doc1.docx. Word states on https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/description-of-how-word-creates-temporary-files-66b112fb-d2c0-8f40-a0be-70a367cc4c85#ID0EDFBDBD about this file:

When you try to open a file that is available on a network and that is already opened by someone else, this file supplies the user name for the following error message:

This file is already opened by user name. Would you like to make a copy of this file for your use?

However, at this stage of testing, this file is not likely to be used for locking, only to provide the username. How the locking works under certain circumstances, e.g. SMB drive, is still unclear, because it does not work everywhere; for example, in the Nextcloud with the corresponding sync client it behaves exactly the same as in a Cryptomator vault, no locking takes place. Dropbox even shows the username of the other account live in Word (maybe in an overlay?).

Perhaps the locking is done at the protocol level, e.g. at the SMB server, which is informed that a file is being processed and then does not pass this lock on to the other parties accessing the file, but this requires further research and is only speculation.

LibreOffice, on the other hand, creates a file ~lock.power.ods in the same folder, which marks the file as currently being edited, and thus works within a Cryptomator vault.