Sharepoint documents being corrupted.

Question

While collaborating with a colleague on a shared document, the text and table formatting will become corrupted. Letters and words will get scrambled, removed or duplicated while I am actively working on the document. Tables will lose their formatting requiring me to revert to an earlier version of the document. What might be causing this issue and how might I avoid these problems in the future? I have attached an example of the phenomenon.

Answer 1

Dear Zogan,

Thanks for your updates and letting us know the current situation in your environment.

It seems to be an issue in your tenant.

If you are the administrator, I suggest you follow the steps in Get support - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn to open a support ticket to our related team as soon as possible.

About admin roles in the Microsoft 365 admin center - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn

How do I find my Microsoft 365 admin? - Microsoft Support

The administrator should be able to open the support ticket from Help & support in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Then you can select the Phone support or the Email support as follows.

Thanks for your effort and hope that the issue can be soon fixed by our related team.

Sincerely

Cliff | Microsoft Community Moderator

Answer 2

Yes, I have been restoring corrupted documents from a previous version of the document. It is not my co-worker mistakenly changing the table format, in many cases the event happened at a time when my coworker merely had the document open and was not actively editing. Furthermore these are not mere formatting changes, here is an example of a sentence that got scrambled:

This type of thing has been happening multiple times a day with both tables and text, and is clearly a bug in the software, not a user error. Backing up the file has been something that I have been doing frequently, but is there any chance that someone from microsoft looks into fixing this bug? I would be happy to help in any way I can.

Answer 3

Dear Zogan,

Thanks for your updates.

If you work on the file with co-authoring, some additional modification by other users may cause the text and table formatting issue. For example, you edit the file and at the same time, some users mistakenly change the format of the file, the changes will be synced at the real time with AutoSave.

I suggest you check the version history to see whether some possible versions of the file can be restored instead of manually fixing the format issues of the file and frequently back up the file at your side.

View the version history of an item or file in a list or library - Microsoft Support

Thanks for your understanding.

Sincerely

Cliff | Microsoft Community Moderator

Answer 4

Unfortunately that will not work as a solution as we will be editing at the same time. If I wanted to lock other users from editing, I could just work in a word document. This has happened multiple times when a coworker had the document open, but was not actively editing.

Answer 5

Dear Zogan,

There may be multiple reasons causing the issue.

For example, as the file is shared, some people may also edit the file by using the co-authoring feature (Co-author Office files - Microsoft Support)at the same time as you edit the file. Some additional editing may cause the issue. I suggest you check the version history to see whether some possible versions of the file can be restored instead of manually fixing the format issues of the file.

View the version history of an item or file in a list or library - Microsoft Support

Meanwhile, as a suggestion, I suggest you enable Check Out and Check In in the site library where the file is saved. After enabling it, the file will be locked when you edit it without any other user's editing.

Check out, check in, or discard changes to files in a SharePoint library - Microsoft Support

Thanks for your time and effort.

Sincerely

Cliff | Microsoft Community Moderator