Saved Word documents are invisible
When Microsoft Word 2019 Q saves documents to folders shared on the network from my Mac mini’s external RAID system, they become invisible in the Finder on connected Macs. How can I make them visible again?
Microsoft doesn’t appear A keen for you to save Word documents directly to shared folders, although it does recommend its own OneDrive cloud or a SharePoint service. There’s no good reason why Word shouldn’t be perfectly capable of creating and accessing documents on fileshares on your Mac.
Problems can arise because of the network file sharing protocol being used. In the past, AFP was popular, but particularly for use with Apple’s newer file system APFS, SMB is now preferred, and for Apple silicon Macs sharing from APFS can be mandatory. Using a mixture of older and newer versions of macOS can also cause problems, as can the RAID software.
If you can, upgrade your Mac mini to the latest version of macOS it supports, and see whether that stops those Word documents from becoming invisible. You may find that using a more recent version of macOS on clients, so they’re using the latest version of SMB, and updating Word to version 16.65 or later also helps.
At worst, you may find it better to save Word documents locally and sync those folders with your shared RAID system.