Excel workbook open by multiple users has random undo behaviour

Question

We had some unexplained data losses during a multi author session in Excel so have just done a small experiment using 2 users. We'll call them Candor1 and Shlambam2.
When two or more users are working in the document if Candor1 fills a cell, and Shlambam2 hits undo on her open version, it undoes Candor1's work (deletes it).

This seems crazy as I might hit undo, it doesn't work so I hit it again and it works but I don't realise I've undone another users work and nor do they.

We have situations where there are 5+ users in a workbook. Have we setup Excel wrong or should we disable undo somehow?

We have user on Mac/Windows and a mix of O365 online and Office app.

Answer 1

Hello Lee,

Thank you for posting to community forum.

Based on the description, the users can undo the other users’ changes when work together in co-authoring in Excel file. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any official articles that would confirm this behavior, and we also couldn’t reproduce the same symptoms in our tests in Excel desktop version and Excel for Web – the users can undo only their work, but not the others’. But if the users edit the same part of the file only one changes are saved.

In this case to narrow down the source of this issue, we kindly ask you to provide some additional information:

• Is the Excel file stored on OneDrive or on SharePoint site?
• Do all co-authors have the same permissions for the file or library?
• Does the same issue apply to another shared Excel files or only to specific one? What about other Office shared files like Word or PowerPoint?

Best Regards,

Igor