Sharepoint and File Locking

Question

I have a file I'd like to share with my organization. It's too large to email so I upload it to SharePoint. By default, SharePoint allows editing of files. I do not want the file to be editable. I want users to download a copy and use it. To accomplish this, I have to do this procedure *every time* I upload a large file:

1. Upload the file
2. Click the 3 dots to the right of the file name when I mouse-hover.
3. Select "Share"
4. Change the link setting to "Specific people" and UNCHECK "Allow Editing".
5. Hit Apply
6. Choose the exact same group the sharepoint site is for in the first place and send.

This process is convoluted but I haven't seen another way to disallow editing on a per file basis. Why can't I just select the file sharing properties for this file and require it be downloaded? I don't know.

Team members are allowed to upload other files and those may need to be editable online. This particular file is too large for that and must be downloaded. 

After all that, people will still click the file and SharePoint will open it in Excel 365, which is not the desired behavior. Excel 365 will fail to open the file because it is too large and ask you if you want to download it. If you do that, which you probably would since I told everyone to download the file, it will lock the file and there is presumably no way to unlock it again. That means it can't be deleted when a new version is available. 

The "proper way" to download the file is to hover your mouse over it, click the 3 dots and select download, but this process is counter to every team member's experience with the way the internet works. (Click the link, get what you want. I can explain the "3 dot download process" ad infinitum but people are going to left-click that file.)

Is there a better way to do this? The file contains sensitive information and we have a business agreement with Microsoft so I'd like to use it, but SharePoint just isn't working.

I've seen lots of other posts about this problem so here are some notes:

• "Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited?" is set to false and should be irrelevant anyway since I did the 6 steps above.
• I have tried clearing browser caches and multiple browsers on multiple computers. The file(s) are locked.
• The only way to find out who actually locked the file is to actually try to check it out yourself. If you try to delete the files it just says it's locked by "another user". This isn't helpful.
• When logged in as the user who actually locked the file, there is no indication that they locked the file and no obvious way to unlock it. This person still has the option to check out the file, but it will fail if they try.

Answer 1

Hi jce_,

Sorry for the inconvenience it may have caused.

If you want users to only be able to browse and download the documents you uploaded, you can add these users to the Visitor group. In this way, when users in the Visitor group access related sites, they only have the permission of view only.

Here are some KB articles for your reference:
Authorization, users, groups, and the object model in SharePoint;
SharePoint site permissions;

Or you can customize permissions for a SharePoint list or library to further edit the permissions of specific document libraries. From there you can break the inheritance and remove/add permissions to your liking. In your case you have to change the permissions to "View Only" for the groups or users who shall only have read permission. And you would have to make sure that the documents in the folder inherit the permissions from the folder.

If you want to download directly to the local when you click the file name, add the following JSON code to the library. Make sure “Opening Documents in the Browser” is set to “Open in the browser” firstly.
{

"$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/sp/column-formatting.schema.json",

"elmType": "a",

"txtContent": "@currentField",

"attributes": {

"target": "_blank",

"href":"[$FileRef]"

}

}

For the downloaded SharePoint documents will be locked, which is expected behavior of SharePoint co-authoring, which is mentioned in Document collaboration and co-authoring.

Best regards,
Madoc

Answer 2

This is helpful. I will try formatting the column to be a link. That should solve the problem of people checking out and locking files while still allowing everyone to upload. Thank you for the response.