“Refresh Recommended: a newer version of this file is available on the server” on MS Word iPad

Hi there,

I have been experiencing this issue from time to time since I got my new iPad Pro and had the Microsoft Word/PPT logged in with my school email. Randomly when I edit a doc, a notification would pop up going “REFRESH RECOMMENDED: A newer version of this file is available on the server”. Either by leaving it be or click refresh, the file would be updated and corrupted: they all become a file of 66kb size and cannot be opened. Restoring the document function also does not work and I had to resort to Time Machine on MacBook to get my data back. Even after I had retrieve it, it would still recur sometime after my next edit. I read some relevant posts in which mentioned that the issue occurred to shared docs from Teams or Sharepoint of Mac users, but in my case all the files are private and created by myself. Also, some said clearing the MS Word cache in Finder would fix, but I use iPad therefore such a move cannot be done, I tried reinstalling, clearing the cache in settings, logging in again, changing the file name as well, but none of these worked in the long term, and the issue keep recurring to my docs randomly (some docs remained perfectly fine, very weird). I have contacted the IT Team at my university and all their advices were unhelpful.. This is hopeless.

Best, Stevie Xu