Why are changes lost when users check-in documents in SharePoint?

Question

Here is what some users are doing:

1. Checkout a document from SharePoint
2. Edit the document in Office (e.g. Excel or PowerPoint)
3. Save the document.
4. Check-in the document

The document library is versioned, so SharePoint creates a new version of the document. However, when the users open up the document again, the changes they made are not there. It is as if they just uploaded a copy of the previous version. What could be casuing this, and how can we fix it?

Other details:

• Approval is required on the list, but all users editing documents have the ability to see documents in the draft state.
• It seems to only happen to certain users on certain documents

Answer 1

check the Draft Item Security in document library versioning setting.

If you’ve enabled “Only users who can edit items” for “Who should see the draft items in this document library”, users without edit item permission cannot see the updated version of the document until the major version has been published.

Answer 2

It turns out somebody in our organization messed something up in the Microsoft Project 2003 installation file, so anybody with Project 2003 had this bug. That installation file must have changed a DLL, modified permissions, or did something to mess up shared components with other Microsoft Office applications. I had no idea that installing Project 2003 could actually prevent somebody from saving a document from Microsoft Word into SharePoint, but it can.

Answer 3

This issue is also discussed over at:

https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/59530/sharepoint-2010-ocassionally-not-saving-users-changes

OP:

Our users are experiencing an elusive issue in which their changes will not save to sharepoint. I have watched the users procedure for editing the documents, and this issue is occurring randomly throughout the organization on different machines/users.

Response (slightly edited):

We had an almost identical problem with the documents and the solution was to have the user clear out their IE cache under "Internet Options"-"Browsing History" (I had them clear everything). Then the user had to start Disk Clean-up (C Drive properties) and selected "Temporary Internet Files" and deleted them too. This cleared up the save issue and locking as well. Hope this helps.