Version History in SharePoint

Version History might just be one of the best features that exists in SharePoint Online. It keeps track of any changes that have ever been made to a document and allows you to override changes by restoring the document to a previous version.

Any time a change is made to a document, a new version is created and saved in SharePoint, detailing who made the changes and when. This includes changes to the document content as well as any changes to the metadata.

So how does it work?

Version history is turned on by default in all document libraries in SharePoint Online.

Simply navigate to the relevant document, click the ellipses, and select “Version History”

You will then see a window with a list of all the previous versions of the document, when the changes were made and who they were made by:

This window will also show you any changes that have been made to the metadata. In the screenshot above you can see that changes have been made to the Project Name and Customer Name metadata.

To view the full content of the document version, simply click on the date and time to open the document:

If you would like to restore a previous version of a document, click the drop-down arrow on the version and select “Restore”:

This will make it the new current and latest version of the document.

NOTE: For versioning to work, documents need to keep the same file name. If you download a file, change the name and upload it back into the document library, the version history will start from scratch as the file name is the key identifier for version history.