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Sharing / Collaboration of documents via Dropbox

Use Dropbox for sharing Office documents and collaboration on editing, but it’s not ideal.

Another use for Dropbox is sharing Office documents and collaboration on editing, but it’s not ideal.

With Office 2013 you can do this better with Skydrive because Microsoft’s own cloud storage allows simultaneous collaboration – in other words more than one person can open and edit a document at the same time.

Skydrive also has ‘Office Web Apps’ – the web versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote to let you work on files from almost any computer.  Dropbox has no equivalent of that feature.

With Dropbox and other online storage, there’s the risk of different versions of the document overwriting or conflicting with each other.  That’s likely to happy if people work on a document and save their changes around the same time.  The result is lost edits and general confusion.

If you do want to share and collaborate on documents via Dropbox, make a shared folder . Then save the document to that folder. Others with access can edit the document and upload their revisions – one at a time.

We strongly recommend that you keep a copy of the originally uploaded file and some interim versions in case of a problem.

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