Working with Version History in Microsoft 365

Something I like to do when I teach Microsoft 365 is ask how many people have multiple drafts of documents. I always see lots of hands go up. For the sake of this discussion, let’s call them First Draft, Second Draft and so on. (The documents, not the people – that would be weird)!

Then I’ll say, raise your hand if you have a document called Final Draft. Once again, plenty of hands go up. Now for the fun part. I ask people to keep their hand up if they have something like Final Draft 1, or Final Draft A, or even Really Really Final Draft. That gets a few laughs, but there are usually several hands still raised. I even had one participant tell me that when they saved the final draft, they typed the filename all in UPPERCASE! True story!

The problem with all this is that we now have lots of documents floating around, maybe someone was emailed a copy, so they have a separate draft as well. This can lead to all kinds of confusion and time wasting. This is where Version History comes into play.

What is Version History?

Version History is the antidote to all this messing about with multiple copies of your documents. Instead of having copies all over the place, you can have a single source of truth. No more ugly crying because you can’t find the right copy of your beautiful policy document!

The good news is that if you’re using Microsoft SharePoint, or OneDrive to store your documents, then you already have Version History. It’s enabled as a default setting. Each time a document is edited, the original version is retained, and a new version is automatically created.

The advantage of this is that both the older and newer versions of the document are always available. If you decide that the changes you made are incorrect or unnecessary, you can simply restore the document to a previous version. The changes are contained in a single document rather than multiple files, simplifying management and maintenance

How to Use Version History

In this example, I’ll be using Word, but it also applies to Excel and PowerPoint files.

1. To access Version History, ensure you have the relevant file open, the click on the filename at the top of the screen. You’ll see Version History in the drop down.
2. Click Version History to open the History pane.

The Version History pane shows all versions of your document in a list.

3. Click on any version in the list to see who made the changes, and when.
4. Choosing a version shows you a comparison between the latest version and the on you selected. To revert to a previous version, click on the Restore button at the top of the screen.

The previous version is restored and becomes the latest version. Also, you don’t need to worry if you change your mind, since the version you were working on before restoring is still saved. Therefore, you can revert to the reverted document if you want, but you may need to lay down for a while if you get a bit dizzy with all these versions!

Happy Versioning!