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Pooya Obbohat's avatar
Pooya Obbohat
Steel Contributor
Mar 14, 2018
Solved

Can't open document shared with me in Word desktop application

Someone shared a document with me via OneDrive for Business, but this only gives me the option to edit the document online. The option to edit the document in the desktop application is only available to me when working on documents stored in my own OneDrive for Business.  I'm logged in with the correct account in the desktop application and I have tested this in another tenant and can't find a way to enable that option. Is there a setting for this or is this by design? 

  • StephenRice's avatar
    StephenRice
    Mar 14, 2018

    Hi all,

     

    I think I know what is happening here. Pooya Obbohat, when you receive the document from your partner, what experience are you seeing when you click on the link? My expectation is that you are seeing the new one time passcode flow (i.e. a code gets sent to your e-mail address, you enter it into the web page and then you get the document in Word Online). If this is the case, then this is expected. Even though you are signed in with an O365 account, your session in this tenant is actually not connected with your O365 account (beyond us verifying that you own that e-mail address). We don't currently have support for opening in the native apps in these cases.

     

    There is work currently in-progress to make this experience better (when you access a OTP link but are signed in with an O365 account) so keep an eye out for that :)

     

    Now, if you were added as a guest user in a Group and attempt to open a file that is stored in the site, you should be able to open that in Word (since you have an account). If that isn't working, please let me know so we can dive deeper there. Thanks!

     

    Stephen Rice

    OneDrive Program Manager II

  • Maybe the company of which you received the document set a Device acces policy which doesn`t allow to open/ sync the file outside the browser.
    • Pooya Obbohat's avatar
      Pooya Obbohat
      Steel Contributor

      Thanks for the reply. I've tested with a new trial environment and get the same experience. It does work for the consumer version of OneDrive though. Can you confirm that this should work for OneDrive for Business as well? Based on my tests this seems to be by design, but I hope I'm wrong.  

      • Salvatore Biscari's avatar
        Salvatore Biscari
        Silver Contributor

        It should definitely work.

        I guess you are doing something wrong: can you please detail your steps?

         

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