Question MS Office syncing across devices

[tinpanalley]

I have never understood this and the desire to leave Google products has me having to figure it out again, but I'm stuck..

Is there no functionality for free in Online Office products like with Google Docs where you can pop in or out of a document or spreadsheet and have access to a file at the same time on different devices in MS Office online or MS365? It seems documents in Office will frequently tell me there is a sync issue and asks if I want to save a different version of the file? But I don't want different versions floating on different devices. I don't get why MS can't get this right. Or is it me doing something wrong?

 

[mikeymikec]

I've spent less time on the web-based versions of MS Office than Google Docs, but are you saying that if you have a doc open in say web Excel and try to open it in another instance of web Excel, it will act like the Windows version and say there's a file lock?

What does Google Docs do in this situation, surely it's a potential problem if two users are editing the same document simultaneously?