rss

Sharepointology

Sharepointology is the study and handling of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Watch out with Discard Check Out from within Word

Posted 11Jan09 by Erwin in General

exclamationOne of our users came to me and told me he lost all of the changes he made to a document checked out from SharePoint, strange thing was, he was sure he had saved the document in between changes.

After investigating this a bit more I recreated what happened:

Consider this first scenario:

  • A user checks out a document from SharePoint.
  • He edits the document in Word 2007.
  • Then he saves it.
  • He closes Word 2007.
  • Word displays the next question:

Check in from Word 2007

Nothing wrong with that, changed are being saved to the document and you can choose to check in the document, but now for the scenario the user had:

  • He checks out a document.
  • Edits the document in Word 2007.
  • Saves the document.
  • Changes it some more.
  • The last changes are not correct and the user doesn’t want to save these changes.
  • He closes Word 2007.
  • Word displays the next question:

save-from-word

  • User chooses “No” because the last changes are not correct.
  • Word 2007 asks another question:
  • Now this is a dangerous question.

discard-from-word

If the user clicks “Yes” this will mean he will loose lose all of his changes since he checked out the document and NOT only the last changes he made to the document.

 

  1. Enforce Check Out in Sharepoint

RSSIf you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.

5 Responses

  1. Todd Klindt

    Good tip.

    In your final paragraph I like you meant “lose” their changes not “loose” them. Loose rhyms with Moose.

    tk

  2. Erwin

    Thanks Todd, changed it. Spell check isn’t of much use for these things.

  3. Mark

    Greeting!

    There is a 3rd party tool called myDocs which specializes in email managemant on SharePoint.You can visit http://www.nsynergy.com/Products/myDocs/Pages/About_myDocs.aspx or mail to info@nsynergy.com for more imformation.

  4. ej

    I just had a similar thing happen last night. I had the word doc saved to my sharepoint drafts folder on my laptop. But I didn’t want to check it in last night as I needed it in the field this morning. So I went to the sharepoint and discarded the check out so others could see the previous version but not the version I am working on. I assumed when I did this that it would leave the version on the site but the updated one on my laptop. Instead the copy on my laptop is gone and the version on the server is the previous one.

    Totally sucks.

  5. jj

    I had the same issue as ej. Is there anyway to get the document back????????

Leave a Comment

About

My name is Erwin Bastiaensen and I am a Software Architect from Belgium, with a huge interest in technology. Lately I have been involved in some Java projects and implementing, interfacing and extending a Sharepoint portal.

You can contact me at sharepointology[@]gmail.com.

View Erwin Bastiaensen's profile on LinkedIn