Office 365 to retire co-editor chat access in documents

2 min. read

Published on March 25, 2020

published on March 25, 2020

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According to a message in the Office 365 Message Center, Microsoft announced today that they will be retiring co-editor chat access inside of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint across all versions of Mac and Windows office, as well as the web starting in mid-April.

With the change, Microsoft recommends that Office 365 customers use Microsoft Teams Chat for real-time collaboration and messaging, or use the document “Comments” feature if you need to attach a comment for a specific section of a document. Once the co-editor chat feature has been retired, users will continue to see the names of co-editors in the document but the chat function will no longer be available. Depending on admin settings, it is possible that some users may continue to see an option to “Join Chat” that will launch a Teams window or Skype, or show that chat is unavailable.

Microsoft suggests that to prepare for this change, Office 365 customers start using Microsoft Teams chat for real-time collaboration. The announced change isn’t a surprise as Microsoft puts more emphasis on their Teams platform to manage the exponential growth. Just this week, Microsoft also announced new Office 365 service restrictions as usage soars with more than 12 million new users added in just the last seven days.

Radu Tyrsina

Radu Tyrsina has been a Windows fan ever since he got his first PC, a Pentium III (a monster at that time). For most of the kids of his age, the Internet was an amazing way to play and communicate with others, but he was deeply impressed by the flow of information and how easily you can find anything on the web. Prior to founding Windows Report, this particular curiosity about digital content enabled him to grow a number of sites that helped hundreds of millions reach faster the answer they're looking for.