The Arrival of Real-Time Co-Authoring on OneDrive

This week Microsoft announced real-time co-authoring as a first-look for Word documents that are stored on OneDrive, as part of the latest Office 2016 Preview release.

OneDrive co-authoring

Now when two or more people run the latest preview and open the same Word document form OneDrive, they can co-author with others in real-time. Allowing cursor location and text edits made by other users to be automatically seen as they occur.

To try out the new feature, you need a Word document stored on OneDrive, with two or more people running the latest office 2016 preview. You need to give all users edit permissions, so they can edit and make changes to the document. The first time you try real-time co-authoring, you will be prompted in the upper right hand corner of your Word document asking you if you’d like to automatically share your changes.

Users only have to click Yes to join the document viewing and editing. Once both authors have clicked Yes, you’ll see a flag which represents the other author’s cursor position and then you will automatically see their edits coming in.

Try it today, with documents you are working on with others, that also need to see and edit it.