Requests for correction on behavior to open in edit mode of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business due to specification changes on MC 1
When opening Word, Excel, PowerShell files of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business in Office Online with MC 131670 published in Message Center, it opened directly in edit mode.
As usual, please restore it so that it can be opened in viewing mode by default.
Or, add setting items so that you can select edit mode or viewing mode as the default value.

61 comments
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Micky commented
Yes. We must be able to open in viewing mode. Thanks.
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Michael P. commented
As previous comments have said, at least provide admins an option to change what the default behavior is, instead of changing it on us with no option to revert. Unacceptable.
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April commented
Please apply this to OneNote as well.
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Mike Richards commented
Please fix this absurd behaviour asap, the constant accidental altering of files or even just modified dates with the combination of default edit and auto save seems like a pretty poor trade off against simply having to click edit before changing a document.
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Paolo Tomasi commented
The current behaviour is plainly stupid, Microsoft. Are you jusy trying to increase the number of versions, so you can charge more for storage space?!? The default behaviour by site MUST become customizable, particularly as opening in view mode WAS the default until quite recently!!! And it worked perfectly.
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Janet Henry commented
When is this going to be addressed? This has been on their radar for two years now and no response from the team? They need to make it an administrator setting for the sites, this is a disastrous set up.
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Marie Kennison commented
Change to view by default. Can edit when needed.
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Anonymous commented
Please allow the SharePoint Administrator to "choose" an option to have Word documents open in full view or edit view. When you use the "Share" feature to send a word document and an end user opens it they see the edit view and have to click on view and then again click on reading view to see it displayed with the header and footer. It is not professional looking to send a document in "edit view" and force my end users to complete two more steps. This should be an easy fix. Headers and footers for Procedures hold valuable information that needs to be seen.
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Anonymous commented
This odd feature of opening in edit makes it really hard to keep track of versions, and is confusing to users who are just trying to look at a document (probably this is the case vast majority of the time). Should open in read only and the user given the option to change to edit mode.
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Anonymous commented
Without a doubt, these files should open as read only by default. Users most often just want to view the contents of the files without editing. When the file opens in edit mode, by default, it saves the item as a new version, records your name as the modifier, even if no changes were made. Not efficient from a compliance perspective.
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Åsa commented
Yes please, change to 'viewing mode' by default.
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Dave commented
Unbelievable.
I just spent a week with MS Support due to our auditing showing a significant increase in edits due to all documents being opened in edit mode online. Most edits were accidental / unintentional. To add to the user confusion, documents now open with no header or footer. Supports official response:
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We can achieve it using the "Protect Document" option.
1. Open SharePoint document
2. Click on File > Info
3. Select "Protect Document".
Currently, we do not have any option/setting to apply protected view for specific site or to whole tenant.
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We are now looking at the very painful proposition of migrating back to on-prem servers which do not have this particular “feature”.
Not sure how or why MS thought this was a good feature. Needs to be remediated ASAP. -
kh commented
Yes @Eris S, this is a duplicate of https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/34659826-add-documentlibrary-setting-for-opening-in-view-or
These should be combined.
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Anonymous commented
turn on tracking changes and lock the tracking.
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Eric S commented
"Joris Tielkes commented · February 07, 2019 04:23 ·
The combined votes of this suggestion and https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/34659826-add-documentlibrary-setting-for-opening-in-view-or
would put it higher on the priority list. Can this be merged?" -
Dries commented
Cannot agree more with the need for this option. In the post below a Microsoft colleague is saying this will be enabled, however this is now more than 1.5 year ago...
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Anonymous commented
I can't understand why this does not have more voting...
Opening documents in edit mode by default combined with the autosave feature is jeopardizing the draft/approval features.
People are opening document for viewing and regularly we find documents generating a new draft/version when there was no intent to modify the document and it starts an approval process.
This make no sense at all. I can't understand how business are using these features efficiently...
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Cory Kennedy commented
This is so important. As a customer recently going live with this product to host some internal documents it is very difficult to keep reminding people that it will be autosaving all changes. Plus the fact we can't stop people sharing and granting others access through a link, the non super users then also have access and start editing templates and policies! This needs to be addressed
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Ty commented
I agree, the customer should have the option to toggle the behavior especially since this was changed from the original behavior anyways.
I'd personally prefer not to have to go through countless versions since we use version history to find the correct one each time someone accidentally makes a change and it auto saves.
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Maggie Padgett commented
This is a massive mistake by Microsoft and this should be changed back to how it was previously and documents should open in read only mode. This should be something Office 365 Admins can govern by enabling the setting in our own tenant and should not have been applied as a global change for all customer tenants. This is causing major headaches for our business and makes me rethink my decision about Office 365 and full cloud services Agree with this comment so I reposted it :)