Losing Data in a Shared Workbook

If you have Office 365, pop your workbook onto SharePoint or OneDrive and send sharing links to your co-workers.

You don't need the Share Workbook button on the Review tab - the workbook can be opened by multiple users and each user can see almost real-time what colleagues are doing. Changes you make are saved automatically to the central copy every few seconds.

As I understand it, this does away with the "multiple copies" problem described by Allen.

There are some limitations - major changes such as deleting worksheets may be blocked when multiple users have the workbook open.

Hello again. I wanted to share what I have found that may be an issue.

I have several workbooks stored on my shared external drive. Only myself and one other person has access to these files that are also password protected. Information seems to get erased/not saved when the documents are in "Compatibility Mode" using Microsoft Excel and/or Microsoft Word. These issues happen randomly and without consistency. I have noticed that once I convert the file, the issue of lost data no longer happens. Here is how to convert the file from Compatibility Mode...

Open up a document and look at the top ribbon to see if it is in “Compatibility Mode”.

If so, click on File and then click on Convert. A pop up window will appear and then click Yes. The document is no longer in Compatibility Mode.

Not sure if this "fix" above is working because myself and the other person who has access to these files on my shared external drive have the same version of Microsoft Office, but I would imagine that this helps.

At work we use excel spreadsheets as a rota system, it is saved on the company intranet and around 15 people have access to it although I am primarily the one who makes any changes to it.
For a long time now I have been convinced that there is something odd going on i.e. corrections and amendments that seem to revert back to previous editions. I have always put this down to my own error as I cannot 100% guarantee that I made these amendments, even though I am pretty sure I did.
It is interesting to read your thoughts on sharing on the intranet; do you think the same would apply to a shared network drive?
The problem is not multiple users amending the same file simultaneously, as not more than one person can work on the rotas at any one time. Our master template gets altered and ‘saved as’ to create our weekly rotas so often I just started to wonder whether these multiple overwrites could be causing a problem?

Peter,

The excel workbook automatically saves every 5 minutes. Not sure exactly what you are referring to. Please provide more detail. Thanks.

Marla

I developed a project some years ago. Data was entered into a form, calculations made and then the data values copied to a list. Each time the data was copied, the workbook was saved (a bit like a database).

Perhaps you can have something like this, alternatively, you hhave have a macro in each book to save it say every five minutes using Now + timer

HTH
Peter

Adryan,

Thanks for your response. I am not sure what our IT department has in mind for the next step; however, with the yearly license cost of Office now, I am not sure that they will want to attempt trying another version. Have a great day.

Marla,
I have no idea of what is causing it. Mistery! What i can say, try another version of Office, or maybe Libreoffice, for a couple of weeks, just to see if the corruption occurs.

Adryan,

Thanks for responding. Yes, I have actually made a new template with my personal computer that is not on our company server. Note: My personal computer runs the same version of Microsoft Office "Home and Business 2013" as well as the same operating system "Windows 7 Professional". After composing a new template, I then copied it to my work computer and have been using this template with each new project. The workbook is NOT shared... it is password protected and only myself and my assistant have the password to modify these files.

Marla, good morning. I want to help you, if I can. These workbooks are shared? Did you already tried to work on a completely new file, to see if data gets lost?

Hello,

I have a very similar issue as Karen; however, my problem is a password protected workbook, stored on a company network, periodically loses data it previously contained. The company I work for is running Microsoft Office Home and Business 2013. I have had our IT attempt to resolve this issue; however, they cannot figure it out. This issue is now happening in our Word program documents as well. My position here is Document Control and I work in Excel spreadsheets daily (Vendor Document Registers) as well as Word for cover pages, section sheets, etc. My spreadsheets were being saved to our company servers and only myself and my assistant has the password to modify these VDR documents. In an effort to try and resolve the issues of lost data, we purchased external drives and now the spreadsheets are being saved on my external drive. This is still not resolving the issue of lost data. Is anyone else experiencing this kind of issue? If so, please respond with a resolution.