The above is true, but there are caveats. Under the hood, Office is constantly saving back to Sharepoint and trying to merge changes. If it can't merge changes it will simply alert the user and give the option of abandoning their changes or saving them locally for manual merge later.
In my experience, merging seems to fail more often with Excel and PowerPoint than Word, but even in Word applying doc-wide changes (e.g. change of language) while someone else edits usually fails.
For sequential editing it works fine and keeps an automatic version history.
That’s interesting——I regularly collaborate with 30+ users and have yet to see a merge conflict.
Is it possible you’re using a older version of Sharepoint that isn’t collaboration aware? I know in older versions of Sharepoint, documents get checked out and locked all the time. Are you able to do live editing? If you aren’t, we might talking about different versions here.
With Office 365 and Sharepoint 2016, I was under the impression that collaboration uses operational transformations (like Google Docs) or CRDTs rather than continuous merging —- which isn’t feasible for real-time live editing anyway. Unresolvable conflicts are rare because the merge is happening at the action level, not document level.
The experience in Office 365 has been similar to Google Suite for me.
In my experience, merging seems to fail more often with Excel and PowerPoint than Word, but even in Word applying doc-wide changes (e.g. change of language) while someone else edits usually fails.
For sequential editing it works fine and keeps an automatic version history.