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JoAHouse-5507 avatar image
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JoAHouse-5507 asked WendyLi-MSFT edited

Teams will not open Excel Workbook with Restrictions and will not Autosave

I have placed an Excel workbook in our Teams group, the file extension is .xlsx. The workbook was originally unrestricted and could be opened in Teams, SharePoint, and Excel without any problems. As we moved forward in our project, I needed to set read-only restrictions for all but two users, myself and one other allowed full access to make changes. Once I made those changes three things happened - autosave turned off, I can no longer open the spreadsheet without copying over the current file, and I can no longer see who is also in the file. Is this a general Teams issue? I need to maintain a restricted file and it would be tedious to place a PDF in the Teams group files to keep it updated for users.

Thanks for any help,

Jo Anne

office-sharepoint-onlineoffice-teams-windows-itprooffice-excel-itpro
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1 Answer

YukiSun-MSFT avatar image
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YukiSun-MSFT answered

Hi @JoAHouse-5507,

As we moved forward in our project, I needed to set read-only restrictions for all but two users, myself and one other allowed full access to make changes.

Were the restrictions modified by changing the file permissions via SharePoint > Manage Access? If this is the case, per my test, the process can work as expected regardless of how I opened the Excel file(from Teams, browser or app), as long as I was granted the edit access to the file.

For the situation you described, would you first have a look at the file permissions by opening the file in SharePoint, making sure the permission accesses are set properly?

By the way, are you editing the file in Excel desktop application? How about opening the file directly in Teams or from the browser? If the issue only affects the desktop client, it's suggested to check if the following requirements for collaborating on Excel workbooks at the same time with co-authoring have been met:

  • You need a Microsoft 365 subscription.

  • You need the latest version of Excel for Microsoft 365 installed.

  • You need to sign in to Office with your subscription account. (In your case this would also need to be the account with edit access to the Excel file)


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