- Implementing Versions
- Accessing Versions, Comments, and Author Information
- The Dark Side: Points To Consider
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Accessing Versions, Comments, and Author Information
If upon returning from my lunch break I recognize that my first attempt was better, I can recover my first document by clicking File, Versions again.
When the dialog box opens this time, I can see the list of versions that I’ve saved (look back at Figure 4 if you want to see the list).
If I double-click a version name, presto! My screen splits as that version opens (see Figure 5). I can cut my paragraph from the old version and paste it into my current one.
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Figure 5 Split-screen versions allow cutting from one to paste in the other.
Notice that both of my open documents are named the same thing, and I’m dependent on the version date/time stamp in the top line of the Word document header to tell them apart. The trick is to make sure to paste from the old document into the new one—not the other way around. Word won’t allow changes to a revision, but will instead offer to save the revision to a second Word file—which is a recipe for just the kind of confusion we were trying to avoid.
To check out any witty comments I might have made when a version was created, I can highlight that version and click the View Comments button as shown in Figure 6. I can’t add to or delete these comments.
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Figure 6 Comments on versions cannot be edited later.
As Figure 6 shows, my name appears under the heading Saved by, meaning that I was the author of that specific version. If your name doesn’t show up in this area, it’s because your name isn’t specified in your profile as author.
Thus we arrive at the final and most important step: Once I’ve finished with my final copy, I need to delete all versions before I send it anywhere. That is, I need to open the Versions dialog box, highlight each version (or all of them at once), and click Delete.
If you fail to delete your versions before you distribute your document, you could cause some hair-raising security issues, which brings us around to the dark side of versioning.