Dropbox pulling incomplete excel documents

[Bharper]

Hello,

One of my employees are having an issue with their laptop concerning excel and Dropbox.

We use Dropbox for our field technicians to pull excel spreadsheets to complete a daily report. This spread sheet is a template that they add their data into, and then save to another folder within their Dropbox.

They've contacted me that sometimes, while trying to open the spreadsheet, only half of the document is filled, the last couple columns of the sheet are missing entirely. I did look at their saved versions of the sheet, and some of them are missing data as he states.

They do work in a remote area and I know their signal is spotty at best so I figured it was just data lost from the poor reception. I pulled up the exact form from my work internet and the spreadsheet was complete. He insists that it is an issue with the computer, but I tested it on the exact computer he's complaining about when he brought it back.

Am I correct on my assumption that the cause is just a faulty internet connection? Or could it be cause by an underlying issue, be it with the computer or Dropbox itself?

[Walter]

Hi there @Bharper - thanks for joining our Community and sorry to hear about this.

It sounds like the Dropbox desktop app wasn't fully synced when your colleagues checked the mentioned files.

Can you confirm that you're all using the Dropbox app to sync your edits and that you can all see the file normally on the website? 

Let us know more and we'll take it from there.

[Bharper]

Hi there @Walter,

We use the folders that show up on our file explorer on the operating system (Windows 10) whenever we login to the app. The document then opens directly onto our Microsoft suite installed on the computer. Is there a way to manually refresh the affected files from within the file explorer on Windows 10?

Our employees often work in very remote areas with little to no cell reception. Even if the connection is stable, download speeds are extremely low. 

[Hannah · Accepted solution]

Hey @Bharper. thanks for the reply.

While there's no way to manually refresh specific files through Dropbox, the only way to make sure that the updates are synced across all computers accessing the files, is to make sure the Dropbox app is syncing properly.

This can be done by checking the sync status of the app, which can be found if you hover over the Dropbox icon in the system tray.

The sync status will show you if the files are up to date or if there are any sync errors.

If the app is 'up to date', all changes should be synced across all devices accessing the files and online.

Let me know if you have any questions!