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Forum Discussion
Office 365 Co-authoring on MacOS and Windows. How to avoid conflicted files?
Hello,
We are a team of 7 people using a Dropbox account for our business, with centralised admin.
We have four people using Microsoft Office on a Mac and 2 people (the joint CEOs) using Micros...
This is now resolved. For those of you looking for a solution, I did the following on my mac to get this going:
- I found the setting in the Admin console that let me turn on the "Dropbox folder updates" setting. After doing that, I immediately quit the Dropbox app and re-opened it an hour later. When I re-opened the app, the "you are not eligible' message under Dropbox > Preferences > Sync > Dropbox folder updates was gone, and there was now a button allowing me to move across to 'File Provider' for Mac, which is needed to enable co-authoring on Office documents. I went through that process and let it do it's thing in the background.
- Next, I added 'Dropbox for Teams' as a location in Microsoft 365. I opened Word, went to File > Open > Online Locations > Manage Storage Accounts > Add Storage Accounts > Dropbox for Teams and followed the login prompts. Previously when I tried to do this, my existing account was not recognised and the login process tried to sign me up with a new account, but this time it was working as expected.
- Once Dropbox was added as a Storage account, I opened a Word doc from Finder and could see that the 'Auto Save' toggle in the top left of the document was now turned on, and other colleagues who had completed Steps 1 and 2 were able to co-author the document with me.
It's worth noting that moving across to 'File Provider' moves everything to 'online only' by default, so files are technically no longer available offline, which is great for your hardrive, and there doesn't seem to be much of a lag when you open an 'online' file from 'Finder'. There is an option to move back to an online/offline setup but I haven't investigated that closely yet.
This is now resolved. For those of you looking for a solution, I did the following on my mac to get this going:
- I found the setting in the Admin console that let me turn on the "Dropbox folder updates" setting. After doing that, I immediately quit the Dropbox app and re-opened it an hour later. When I re-opened the app, the "you are not eligible' message under Dropbox > Preferences > Sync > Dropbox folder updates was gone, and there was now a button allowing me to move across to 'File Provider' for Mac, which is needed to enable co-authoring on Office documents. I went through that process and let it do it's thing in the background.
- Next, I added 'Dropbox for Teams' as a location in Microsoft 365. I opened Word, went to File > Open > Online Locations > Manage Storage Accounts > Add Storage Accounts > Dropbox for Teams and followed the login prompts. Previously when I tried to do this, my existing account was not recognised and the login process tried to sign me up with a new account, but this time it was working as expected.
- Once Dropbox was added as a Storage account, I opened a Word doc from Finder and could see that the 'Auto Save' toggle in the top left of the document was now turned on, and other colleagues who had completed Steps 1 and 2 were able to co-author the document with me.
It's worth noting that moving across to 'File Provider' moves everything to 'online only' by default, so files are technically no longer available offline, which is great for your hardrive, and there doesn't seem to be much of a lag when you open an 'online' file from 'Finder'. There is an option to move back to an online/offline setup but I haven't investigated that closely yet.
- T_theresa_A
Community Manager
Hi there andrewkol ,
I’m so glad to hear you successfully got your Office 365 files synchronised across both Mac and Windows OS with Dropbox 🙌. Thank you so much for coming back to the Community to share how you resolved the issue, complete with detailed step-by-step instructions. It’s contributions like yours that keep the Community spirit alive and thriving 🤗.
By the way, I’m Theresa, a Community Manager here at Dropbox HQ 👩💻. If you’re open to sharing, I’d love to hear more about how you use Dropbox in your daily routine and which features you find most helpful.
Also, just as an FYI, we have some dedicated spaces here in the Community. Feel free to take a look around and jump into any conversations that catch your interest 😉.
Thanks again for being such a valuable part of the Community 😀!
Theresa 😺 (Dropbox Community Manager)
