Essential SharePoint 2007, 2nd Edition

Editing, Saving, and Sharing Documents

To open a Microsoft Office document from SharePoint in read-only mode, click on the file. To open an Office document in Edit mode, click Edit in the document's Edit menu. The Edit menu is the drop-down list shown in Figure 2-3 that appears when you click the triangle to the right of the filename.

Figure 2-3. Using the SharePoint Edit menu to open documents

Saving an open document saves your changes back to SharePoint. To see how that works, click Save As and save a copy of the document to SharePoint with a new name as shown in Figure 2-4.

While you have a document open for editing, no one else can edit it. If someone tries, Office displays a dialog box giving three choices as shown in Figure 2-5.

The last option in Figure 2-5 is the most useful one: it opens the file in read-only mode and then lets you switch to Edit mode when the other user closes the file.

Figure 2-4. Office applications can save to libraries as if they were regular file folders

Figure 2-5. Someone else has the file open for editing

Using the Task Pane

When working with documents from SharePoint, Office enables the Document Management task pane (see Figure 2-6), which lists information ...