Co-authoring documents in SharePoint Online

In this SharePoint Online tutorial, I will explain to you an overview of the co-authoring documents in SharePoint Online. Then, I will show you all about co-authoring documents in SharePoint Online. Also, we will see how to collaborate with multiple members. In the last, I will show you, how to disable co-authoring in a SharePoint document library.

Overview of Co-authoring in SharePoint Online

Microsoft provides a lot of features to work with documents in SharePoint Online. One of the most useful features is co-authoring documents. By using this feature, we can collaborate with multiple users at any time, without interfering with each other’s changes.

Also, it is easier to use from the end user’s point of view. Suppose, if you want to work on a document library in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, or any office web app then you can use this co-authoring feature to collaborate with multiple users.

Here, consider the below points to use co-authoring in SharePoint Online. Such as:

• Make sure the users should have edit permission for the SharePoint document library. Then, only users can work on a document library.
• We can use versioning to keep track of all changes in a document library, while users are editing the documents.
• When the user checks out a document library for editing, the document is locked. That’s why don’t enable the “Required Check-Out” feature.
• If you want to disable the co-authoring feature, then enable the Required Check Out feature under the versioning settings in a SharePoint document library.

This is an overview of co-authoring in SharePoint Online.

Co-authoring documents in SharePoint Online

Here, I have a SharePoint Online document library as “Policy Documents” and inside this, I have created an Excel sheet for Employee Details.

Now, I will show you, how to use co-authoring in a SharePoint document library. To achieve it, follow the below steps.

• Open the SharePoint document library where you want to use co-authoring, by default, this feature is enabled.
• Now, I have logged into my test user accounts opened my site, and clicked on the Excel file under the SharePoint document library.
• Then, you can add data and identify who is editing, as shown below.

• Similarly, open another test user’s SharePoint site and open my site. Then, click on the Excel file and add data. Then, we find other users who are editing at a time without interfering with each other’s changes.

This is how to co-authoring documents in SharePoint Online.

Disable Co-authoring in a SharePoint Online Document Library

Suppose, if you want to disable the co-authoring feature in SharePoint Online, then follow the below steps. Such as:

• Open the SharePoint document library, click on the Gear icon or Settings, and select Library settings like below.

• Next, select Versioning settings, then go to the Require Check Out section. Here, by default, it is disabled. Then, you can enable the option (Yes). Then click on the Ok button.

• Once it is enabled, our test users will get only Read-only mode. Here, we can’t add any data like below.

This is how to disable co-authoring in a SharePoint Online document library.

Conclusion

Microsoft provides a co-authoring feature that allows multiple users to collaborate and edit documents at any time. Here, from this SharePoint tutorial, we learned all about co-authoring documents in SharePoint Online. Then, we covered how to use co-authoring in a SharePoint document library and how to disable co-authoring in a SharePoint Online document library.

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