It always appears quietly: beside the workbook you trust, a second file with a name like 'Conflicted copy' and a date in brackets. It is not a virus and not a colleague's prank. It is your sync tool confessing that it met two versions of the truth and refused to choose. Here is how to read that confession and recover cleanly.
Conflicted copies are born where two different collaboration ideas collide. File sync tools — Syncthing, Dropbox, Google Drive's desktop app and their relatives — keep a folder identical across machines by copying files. When the same workbook changes on two machines before the sync catches up, the tool cannot merge spreadsheet content; merging files is not merging data. So it keeps both: your version stays, and the other becomes the conflicted copy. Understanding that one paragraph tells you where they come from, why they will keep coming, and why the merge is a human job.
Example names, real behaviour: the sync tool did its job honestly. It preserved both versions and put the decision exactly where it belongs — with a human.
A network share gives everyone one file that Excel itself coordinates. A sync tool gives everyone their own file and copies changes around afterwards. That is why the remedies differ: a share produces locks and save-merges, while sync produces copies. Teams get conflicted copies precisely when they use a sync tool to do a share's job — most often with a workbook that several people edit through the day.
Merging a conflicted copy is careful, unglamorous work. Do it once, properly, in this order:
Excel hides an old command, Compare and Merge Workbooks, that can merge copies automatically — with a strict condition most office files fail: every copy must descend from the same shared workbook with its change history intact. Copies produced by sync tools from an ordinary workbook do not qualify, and the command stays greyed out or produces nothing trustworthy. Treat it as a bonus when the condition happens to hold, never as the plan.
Conflicted copies stop appearing the day the workbook stops being synced between editors.
The video's shared-folder method keeps one master file for the whole team — the structural reason conflicted copies never appear in that setup.
▶️ Watch Full VideoNeither name answers that. File dates lie because copying and syncing rewrite them, and each file is genuinely newer in different rows: the master holds one person's latest work, the copy holds another's. The only reliable comparison is content — open both, compare totals and the specific sheets, and merge by entries. Whoever edited last overall is not a meaningful question once a fork exists.
In the usual sync-tool situation, no. Automatic merging exists only through the legacy Compare and Merge Workbooks command, and only for copies of a workbook that was in shared mode with change history preserved. An ordinary emailed or synced workbook does not meet that condition, so the merge is manual: align, compare, carry the differing entries, verify totals.
Because before the sync tool, the file travelled by hand and only one copy was being edited at a time — by accident of slowness, the team had a single-writer system. The sync tool made editing everywhere easy, including simultaneously, and simultaneous edits to a copied file are exactly what creates conflicts. The tool is not faulty; it is being asked to do a shared file's job.