How to solve the "Refresh Recommended, A newer version of this file is available on the server"

Don't know if this worked for the person who originally asked the question, but it's bailed me out several times in the past couple of weeks. The OP had also asked this question over on Microsoft's help site, and the people there sent CaryHS off into 'remove your Office license' land.

The duplicate file structure that gets stored in ~/Library/Containers/<etc.> seems to be an artifact of macOS sandboxing. Not sure why only Office documents stored on Sharepoint being edited locally are affected by this weirdness, however.

I'm guessing that there's some weird interaction going on between Office, Sharepoint and OneDrive, since I didn't start having problems with this until I activated OneDrive on my work computer. I have to do this '~\Library\Containers\com.microsoft.<App>\Data' delete thing about once a week to keep things working.

If you haven't solved this yet, try deleting the following folders while Office apps are closed:

~/Library/Containers/Microsoft Word/Data

~/Library/Containers/Microsoft Excel/Data

~/Library/Containers/Microsoft PowerPoint/Data

In older versions of Office, they may be named these:

~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data

~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data

~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Powerpoint/Data

Note that the Library folder is in your home folder. It is a hidden folder and you can reach it by clicking the Go menu in Finder, holding the Option key, and clicking Library.