Can Office 365 save documents to an SD Card?

[ldwhitley]

My wife would like to move her Word and Excel files from her old windows laptop to her Galaxy Tab S 10.5. Among the files she is moving to the Tab S is one that has her passwords for various sites and she quite reasonably refuses to put that information in anyone's cloud. What she wants to do store the files on a removable SD Card and when the need arises, edit her Passwords Excel file and save it back to its location on the SD Card. My question is - is this possible with Office 365? And have you tried it?

She has Office 365 on her Tab S 10.5 but it will not let her edit and save files without a subscription. I have Office 365 on my Tab S2 8.0 and it will allow me to edit and save to the device's internal storage but since the S2 has no SD card slot I can't prove that works.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Rukbat]

1. Have you tried it on her 10.5? Not passwords, just set Office 365 to use the SD card or create a document and save it to the card. (I don't have it, so I don't know how it sets the storage location.)

2. Are you using the same version? If yours would save to the card and hers won't, maybe back yours up to an apk file and install it on her tab. Sometimes they "Fix" things that aren't broken and leave us with a less usable app.

 

[ldwhitley]

First a correction to my question... It turns out that my Samsung Tab S2 8.0 does have a Micro SD Card slot (duh! I forgot! How embarrassing!) and I was able to put the card in and try it with Office 365. MS does not charge for the full Office 365 on an 8" tablet... so it should work. Right? Well... not quite.

When I use Office 365 to read a file from the SD Card, it does so, but labels file as Read Only and does not allow editing. If I try to save that file back to a different location on the SD Card Office 365 complains that it does not have permissions to do that. A little investigation into the question yields some strangeness in Android's handling of SD Cards. There have been iterations in Kit Kat and Lollipop to improve it but it still appears to be a problem.

To continue the experiment above.. if I save the file to the internal storage of the Tab S2 (not the SD Card), Office 365 happily complies and, interestingly, I can now edit the file as well.

To answer your questions directly Rukbat...
1. Yes I have tried it on my wife's Tab S 10.5. But since Microsoft charges for Office 365 on 10" screens and above, and I don't have a license. I was unable to do any real valid experiment.

2. Yes, both tablets are at the same level, Lollipop. I haven't rooted either and trying to avoid doing that. I have read that there are some fixes for this problem with rooted tablets but in reading through it it appears to be very involved and the success rate is low. So I am not going to go down that path.

Thanks for the interest. At the moment, I'm concluding that Office 365 cannot use SD Cards to store its files. That's annoying but I can use AndSMB to move files back and forth between the tablet and the PC ... so that will be my bandaid for now.

ldwhitley