Microsoft Word attempts to save to Sharepoint instead of local drive

Sky,

With all due respect, that's a joke, right?  This is happening on 100% of systems internally AND at client locations.  Clients are furious.  We have multiple Office 365 clients ready to leave for Google because Microsoft is so clueless here and just comes back with these laughable replies.  One client with SEVERAL HUNDRED GB of data followed these directions and spent days resync'ing OneDrive.  That's just unacceptable.  You're also running up cell data bills for clients who use hotspots to access the Internet from laptops.  Normally OneDrive waits until a file is closed before sync'ing it from the local disk, but when a 50MB file is open in Excel and every time one clicks save you have to wait for it to WASTE cell data to save the file is just beyond unacceptable.  Time for Microsoft to step up, realize you have a BUGGY product, admit you have a buggy product, and issue a fix.  Get rid of the junk code that even allows Office to save directly to SharePoint if One Drive is running.  Basically you need an If-Then statement.  If OneDrive is running THEN DON'T save to SharePoint.  It's VERY SIMPLE code.  I'm happy to write it for you.

My apologies for the frustration here, but Microsoft's answers to every issue of late has reverted to the Window 2000-era excuses of, "can't repro" or "by design" and that's no longer acceptable.  You have REAL competition in Google and Google Drive NEVER hijacks Office apps to force this.  You're getting ready to lose customers over poor code and even poorer internal testing and reproduction skills.

I have a client with a very similar issue.

Every time she opens a file from OneDrive and then goes back to save updates to it (F12), it takes her to the Sharepoint path, instead of the local OneDrive path and she encounters an error that the file already exists and she has to rename it. If she uses the >File>Save As> and then selects OneDrive the issue doe snot seem to occur, but if she then tries to open the file from recent documents list, it take her back to the Sharepoint path and the updates are missing. The synchronization between the local One Drive folder and the Online Sharepoint location seems to be delayed now as well. This all started within the last 2-3 weeks and is impacting all Office applications.

One Drive App Version: 17.3.7131.1115

We have tried the same suggestions already as well:

Turned "Office Sync..." off in OneDrive Settings

Turned "Office Sync..." back on in OneDrive Settings

Paused and restarted Sync

Reset OneDrive sync

None of these things have resolved the issue.

The only work around we have found is to use File>Save As, which is multiple additional clicks and is very irritating to the client.

Hi Remboy, 

I can understand the frustration.  The new OneDrive from the most recent update is definitely causing these problems.  Like you all of us here work directly out of our OneDrive Synched folder and now experience the duplicate files or delay when opening a file depending on how "Use Office 2016 to sync Office files" is checked/unchecked.   It seems many of us just want OneDrive to work similar to DropBox.  The collaboration features MS is trying to add is causing problems for us general users and the option provided to turn that off is not working correctly.   

-Bob

Workaround:

The following steps will prevent the undesired behaviour described above:

In Task Manager, under the Details tab, check whether a task named 'FileCoAuth.exe' is running. If so, end the task.

In Windows Explorer, navigate to the following location:

%localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\

In that folder, you will find a sub-folder which corresponds to the current OneDrive version number (e.g. 17.3.7294.0108). In that sub-folder, find and rename the following file:

FileCoAuth.exe -> rename as FileCoAuth.exe.bak

Now, any Office file created within an Office application will save directly to the local instance of the OneDrive folder, and will continue to do so when re-opened and re-saved, or saved with a new name. OneDrive.exe will continue to perform online syncing independently in the background.

Furthermore, this restores the ability to save files directly to a local instance of the OneDrive folder from within an Office application, without the requirement to remain permanently signed in (so don't expect this workaround to last for long!).

Cheers

Jeff