I have recently started to use Microsoft Word on my Mac but only because it appears that the rest of the working world seems to use it. Actually, if I’m honest, I quite like it. It’s much better than the Windows version but I digress. There is something about Word that irritates me: there doesn’t appear to be any facility to revert back to a previous version of a document. Sure I can track changes but that doesn’t seem to do want I want. As far as revision numbers go Word only seems to count how many times the document has been saved. Great, just what I don’t need!
Lets say that I save a document a couple of times but I want to revert back to how it was two saves ago because what I have written recently is wrong. How do I do this? Developers use source code management tools like Subversion or CVS to track changes in code. Is there similar functionality in Word? If not, why not? Currently I am keeping revisions of documents by appending a number at the end of the filename every time I save it. Very sophisticated I think you’ll agree! I’m not a Word guru so it’s possible that I may have missed something. Any help appreciated.
In OpenOffice under the File menu there’s an entry ‘Versions’. This lets you save a version of the document, and revert. It’s manual by default but you can set it to save a new version with each save. I imagine Word must have something similar.
A word of warning though, it does create huge files.