Unintentional document locking

A

asperamanca

Office 2003

I have a document on a network share that is usually only opened for
reading. Sometimes, a user will have to change something.

Now I've tried to think up all kinds of ways to keep the document
writable while other users are only reading it.

My first idea was Word Viewer: A tool that cannot save should not lock
the document, right?

Wrong. It locks it, and better still, you don't even get a
notification telling you who has it open (so you can at least phone
them and tell them to close it).

Opening Read-only in Word has exactly the same effect, and even if it
didn't, most users would still simply double-click in Explorer, and
open the doc normally.

I've tried telling people to make a copy of the file (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V,
is it so hard?), but they don't do it.

Is there ANY way to
a) make Word / Word viewer open a document Read-only in such a way
that another user can LATER open and modify it, whatever the first
user is doing at that time?
b) Enforce it so it will happen automatically (I simply can't rely on
user's goodwill / good memory is seems)

Thanks for your suggestions!

Robert
 

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