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About this lesson
A great feature of Teams is the ability to have multiple people working on the same document at the same time. Also, you'll learn how to restore a previous version of a document as well as check-out documents so others can't edit them. This lesson shows you to work with documents in Teams with ease.
Exercise files
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Co-Authoring Documents in Real Time - Single Tenant.docx.docx40.8 KB Co-Authoring Documents in Real Time - Single Tenant - Solution.docx.docx
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Quick reference
Co-Authoring Documents in Real-Time
Allowing multiple users to edit a document in real-time is one of the most popular features of Teams.
When to use
Co-authoring scenarios happen naturally as multiple Team members collaborate on a document. A popular use of co-authoring is to share a document in a Teams online meeting. The multiple attendees can open the document while it's being shown in the meeting and the entire team can collaborate on changes while viewing them in real-time.
Instructions
Co-authoring only happens when multiple people use the document at the same time. When this occurs, you can see who is editing the document, where they are working, and their edits. As documents are saved automatically, you do not have multiple copies of the same document, each with different names. The online and installed versions of Office will automatically merge the changes when they are in different parts of the document, otherwise, if two people change, say, a Chapter title, the most recent edit is what is shown. You can use the Synch option to copy Teams files to your local PC. You can then edit the files offline and they will be uploaded when you return online. If two people edit the same file, you will be alerted to the conflict and allowed to resolve the differences. You can check a document out to prevent changes and also restore previous versions of document should that be necessary.
Hints & tips
- Document versioning is a great feature and happens automatically. Be sure to become familiar with this feature as it commonly used in Teams.
- In practice, checking-out a document should be used sparingly. Should you fail to check the document back in and are away, only an administrator can override your check-out.
- 00:04 One of the most popular features of teams is the ability for
- 00:07 multiple people to edit the same file at the same time.
- 00:10 And teams makes this easy for you, let's take a look at what that looks like on
- 00:15 our left we have Megan who's logged into the team's app.
- 00:19 And on the right, we're logged in as Irvin,
- 00:22 now Megan is going to open the usability test document in the browser.
- 00:26 When she opens the file, she can see the file is displayed and
- 00:30 can proceed to make the changes that she wishs, so
- 00:33 we'll click on major milestones and we'll just stay here for a minute.
- 00:37 Now in the meantime, Irvin opens the same document,
- 00:41 now to alert Megan to the fact that someone else is also editing the document.
- 00:46 As soon as Irvin opens the document, Megan will receive a notification that says,
- 00:51 hey, guess what someone else is also looking at this document at the same time.
- 00:57 Similarly, in Irvin's environment, he can see that Megan is also in the document and
- 01:02 it can click to see where she is.
- 01:04 Notice that she's actually selected, the headline major milestone
- 01:09 can see that this is marked with a marker that is color coded for Megan.
- 01:15 And it says major milestones for Megan, and then also on the left side,
- 01:20 we can see that Megan can see that Irvin is now also selected the same headline.
- 01:26 In this way, one or the other of them can edit this and
- 01:30 they will both see the changes as they occur.
- 01:34 Let's just call this minor milestones and on Megan's copy,
- 01:38 she can see the changes that Irvin has made in real time.
- 01:41 Now if she doesn't like them, she can update them or she can change it later,
- 01:44 now is this common whenever you're working in collaborative documents,
- 01:48 sometimes you need to explain what's going on.
- 01:51 So you can click the Comment section and
- 01:54 add a new comment and say hey, this should be major and
- 01:59 leave the comment in the document for everyone to see.
- 02:04 And then consequently, on Irvin's copy,
- 02:07 he could see a comment has been added about his edit.
- 02:13 If Megan opens Microsoft Word, she'll see a very similar experience
- 02:18 as to the web experience, she can tell that Irvin is in the document and
- 02:23 click to see where Irvin is at and see her comment here as well.
- 02:27 In some cases when working with multiple people on a document,
- 02:31 the contributor might make wholesale changes that you'd actually rather keep as
- 02:35 the owner of the document.
- 02:36 In this case, the entire history section is deleted, but Megan would really rather
- 02:41 have it back, well Microsoft Office in collaboration with teams makes it easy for
- 02:45 you to revert to previously saved versions of a document.
- 02:49 As you may recall, saves are changed automatically, so there are frequently
- 02:53 multiple versions of documents, even though someone hasn't explicitly saved it.
- 02:58 To do this, she can simply go to File, and then she can click Info and
- 03:05 see the version history of the document.
- 03:09 She can tell that Irvin has been editing the document and
- 03:14 she may like to restore a copy or save a copy of the document.
- 03:19 Microsoft Word and
- 03:21 Microsoft Office as a whole provides even more capability in this regard.
- 03:25 We'll open this document in Microsoft Word, and then we'll click File,
- 03:30 and then Info, here you can see version history.
- 03:33 When you click on Version History on the right,
- 03:37 you can see who saved the document and when.
- 03:40 Once you click on it, you now have the option of compare or restore and
- 03:45 clicking compare opens up and view that is unique to Microsoft Office.
- 03:51 This isn't in the web based applications, where you can see the original
- 03:56 document as well as the revised document and the compare document in the center.
- 04:02 This allows you to do some pretty fine grain tracking on what's been done and
- 04:06 you can see here we're showing the history section in which we want to recover.
- 04:11 Of course, there are times whenever as the document owner,
- 04:14 you may not want anyone editing your document and you can provide for
- 04:18 that capability by checking out a document.
- 04:20 This prevents other people from making edits, let's see how that works, I can
- 04:26 can click on the document, select the Ellipsis, click More, and then check out.
- 04:31 In that case the document becomes marked with a little icon that indicates
- 04:36 it has been checked out on her screen and also over on Irvin screen.
- 04:41 He can hover over the little arrow,
- 04:44 which shows also that Megan has checked out the document.
- 04:49 Now, if Irvin goes to open the document,
- 04:52 he can still view the document, but edits are no longer permitted.
- 04:57 If he wishes to make a change that document,
- 05:00 he's required to save it as a separate document, and then edit the document.
- 05:04 In this way, Megan can preserve her copy of the document,
- 05:08 now when she's done with it, she can go back and check in the document,
- 05:13 make a comment about the changes she made.
- 05:16 And by the way, those comments are then visible and the versions list that we saw
- 05:21 earlier whenever you want to check the versions of a document, so
- 05:24 you can distinguish between the various versions.
- 05:27 She can also discard the checkout, meaning she makes no changes whatsoever,
- 05:32 but just released the document for future years.
- 05:35 This is a very useful feature built right into teams and works great with Office,
- 05:40 so let's review co-authoring documents in real-time in teams.
- 05:44 Multiple authors can work on a document at the same time, the authors and where they
- 05:49 are working are shown in real time to everyone that's working on the document.
- 05:53 And you can see the edits as they happen as well as who's making the edits,
- 05:57 if you wish you can revert to a previous version of a document.
- 06:01 And compare versions of a document when you use the Office application,
- 06:05 you can check out a file to keep other people from editing a document.
- 06:09 And when you're done, you can check it back in or
- 06:11 discard the checkout to release the lock, a great way of using co-editing is in team
- 06:16 meetings which is the next topic of discussion.
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