Annoying popup every time I open a Word document

Hello all,

I have Office 2019 build 2109 and I have saved some Word documents on my personal OneDrive storage and every time I open one of them, a pop up comes up saying that others are editing this document and whether I would like to automatically share my changes.

I know I can never let this message show up again after clicking Yes or No but I don't know why this comes up in the first place since I'm not sharing any of my documents with others. When clicking on the Share button in the right top corner, I can see my own name in the appearing column stating that I'm editing the document.

Is this a normal thing when someone opens his/her own documents that are saved in a cloud?

Can you post a picture of that message.

Do you open that file in your local Word application, or is it on the web?

Office has very strict rules about disabling some options, but you could disable some of them.
One is that you can set safe locations, even for Cloud locations.

Open Trust center (bottom option in Options), and check available options.

No, but I have Office 365. Will check that later again. On phone atm

In the hope of being useful, I have just dug around my own OneDrive.

I found a [shared] Word file I shoved up there years ago and it
- opened online [3 times] in OneDrive without the warning you have been getting, and
- downloaded to my computer & was later opened in Word itself without the warning you have been getting.
I then deliberately closed my browser without closing 2 or 3 open instances of the document.
- When I re-opened my browser and returned after a few minutes, the open instances of the document were gone & I was sill able to open the file online without any warnings appearing.

I think a major difference between our experiences might well be because I do not have OneDrive running on my computer.


Denis

JohnnyGui said:

Thanks for the reply. I'm using a local office Word application. I don't think this is a security thing with trusted locations, but more of a feature with the popup asking whether I want to share my changes. Here's the popup but in Dutch.


Do you get the same thing when opening an existing document from your cloud?

The picture you posted is similar to part in Help: working with shared document. But this is for documents other have shared, not in your Onedrive folder..

Try3 said:

In the hope of being useful, I have just dug around my own OneDrive.

I found a [shared] Word file I shoved up there years ago and it
- opened online [3 times] in OneDrive without the warning you have been getting, and
- downloaded to my computer & was later opened in Word itself without the warning you have been getting.
I then deliberately closed my browser without closing 2 or 3 open instances of the document.
- When I re-opened my browser and returned after a few minutes, the open instances of the document were gone & I was sill able to open the file online without any warnings appearing.

I think a major difference between our experiences might well be because I do not have OneDrive running on my computer.


Denis

Thanks a lot for extensively testing this. I think the major difference is that you're opening your OneDrive documents in your browser. Not sure if you can open them in Word itself without downloading it to your PC first.

Could you please also check the following? In the document opened with Word, click on the Share button on the right. A column will appear containing a drop-down option next to "Automatically share changes". If you change that option to "Ask", does the popup appear next time you open the OneDrive document in Word?

I'm not getting that warning either (in Office 365). No matter if I open the file from Onedrive or locally.

Share button doesn't give me any drop down links, only ask me to whom I want to send the link.