This was my NaNoWriMo 2021 challenge to continue working on, which I did not get far on. That’s the one I could open and edit no problem with it revising the file for both devices in real time. “Shroud Eaters” is a horror in early stages and my first attempt at file sharing between the laptop and phone.The cloud one is a video of my itty bitty teen punching out another girl sparring at boxing.I don’t think you can actually turn that off? Here are three status symbols that show up: I tried opening the OneDrive folder and checking that the file folder within it and the WIP file both have the sync symbol showing sync is turned on. You then have to go through and thoroughly edit the whole thing because you may or may not have remembered right and clicked yes or no to changes correctly throughout the entire document. And repeating if for every extra revision copy you need to combine. But I would not choose to do it unnecessarily because you are going through every single space, character, word, sentence, paragraph, and formatting change made on the two versions through the entire document. It’s nice when you find yourself with multiple rough WIPs of something and don’t know which is better or what changes were made on which and why. I’ve actually done that with files and it’s a great feature when you have the need for it. It also means you essentially end up with more than one file document you now have to be on top of constantly making sure to either upload, download, and save as every time you are going to work on it, or will later have the laboriously time intensive task of using Microsoft Word’s compare files feature to try to combine all the revised file copies into one revision copy. As the original poster of the question commented, this is not a fix, but rather a workaround.
![content control microsoft word template bullshit content control microsoft word template bullshit](http://image.slidesharecdn.com/aguideshortcutkeysalphabeticallisting-13441672482-phpapp02-120805064945-phpapp02/95/a-guide-short-cut-keys-alphabetical-listing-1-728.jpg)
Sounds easy right? As long as you have no intention of going back and forth between devices or have multiple people co-working on the document. The first thing I found on the issue was a Microsoft issues chat from 2014 where all the answers suggested the *fix* of just downloading and saving the file as a new file to edit.
![content control microsoft word template bullshit content control microsoft word template bullshit](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/word2013-templatecontentcontrol-140703074052-phpapp01/95/template-content-control-basics-microsoft-word-2013-2-638.jpg)
I just cannot get it to open in the Microsoft Word app on my phone as an editable file like the other one. I’ve clicked the AutoSave in Microsoft Word to save it to OneDrive cloud-based storage, deleted that OneDrive file, and re-clicked it a number of times. My second file attempt – The Woods, a novel I have been so painfully close to completion for so long and promising to finish and have published, and actually think might in many ways be one of my, if not ‘The’, best – did not go so well. Then I did it the other way around just because I could. I sat there typing on the laptop and watching the words appear on my phone. The idea of being able to edit the same file with real-time live updates on both devices was fun. I tried it with one WIP file and it was pretty cool.
![content control microsoft word template bullshit content control microsoft word template bullshit](https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/how-to-create-drop-down-list-in-word-2.png)
So this attempt at cloud-based file sharing with myself is both an unutilized technology and behavior to be learned. One of my favorite places to write before we had to sell it was at the camper, in the peaceful relaxing slower pace away from home and happens to be far from any sort of working Wi-Fi. Thus the learned extreme hesitancy of using any sort of cloud-based storage where I wouldn’t be able to access anything stored there half the time. I’ve also been accustomed for years to working on anything personal (aka not the pay-the-bills-job) as much in places where I have no Wi-Fi as I do at home with Wi-Fi, including on my lunch breaks at that job for years before Covid sent us to work from home. I’ve been very hesitant to embrace cloud saving of any kind. The idea being that I can edit the same file whether I’m on my laptop or on my phone in another room, or perhaps laying in bed awake at 3am with insomnia. In my efforts to get back to writing and editing with some reasonableness of frequency (aka not not writing and editing), I tried saving a few WIPs in Microsoft Word with the AutoSave to OneDrive feature.