Randy Dean shows how to recover accidentally overwritten files using Version History in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. You can revert to any earlier timestamp, and it's safe to turn on AutoSave because you have a backup. He walks through real examples in each app.
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Alright, good evening everyone. Um, I hope all of you watching this video already know this tip. It's about your version history, and that it specifically is something to use with pretty much any of the documents you might be creating, you know, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and it's a bit of a lifesaver. If you don't know who I am, I'm Randy Dean, popularly known as the Email Sanity Expert, but I want to dive right in on this. I've never made this mistake before. Let me, let me show you what I mean. I'm going to go out here and jump into this Word document because I had an idea on how I could use this Word document right here as the basis for a completely new document with some different information. So I'm going to change a few things, and because I'm so excited about making these changes, I'm just going to get in and start working and start typing and adding and messing up my original. Uh-oh. And then I realize autosave's on. Double uh-oh. Oh, shoot. I just messed up one of my most important documents. Now, of course, right here, what you're going to want to do is go in and hit File, Save a Copy. Now watch what happens. I'm gonna come up here and change this to V2, but I want you to see what happens when I do this. Oops. V2. And now I'm gonna move myself out of the way and hit save. And watch what it's gonna do. It's gonna come up and say, autosaves makes your changes as you make them. If you made unwanted changes, you can restore that through version history. Okay. Interesting. Got it. And now watch what I can do. So I just changed this, but now watch. I can come up here to the top, and I can open this thing up right here at the top where it has the name of the, um, document or file. And if you open this up, you can come down to version history. You can also search for version history using the search field, but it's right here at the top. Come down and hit version history. And by hitting version history, what it's gonna do is it's gonna show you this. Now remember, this is the brand new document. But what I can do is this: File, Open the old version of the document. So I'm going to go File, Open, and right here you see Popular Program Descriptions. Now if I open this one up, because I already made the changes and autosave was on, I still have my mistake. But if I come up in this one now and I come down to Version History, it's not just going to show me the ones that were there, it was going to show me what's happening right here. And so I can come back and hit the modified at 7:30 PM and hit Open Version. Alright? That's the one that must still be on the screen. Let's hit the one that was modified right here. There it is. Did you see? It took out the changes. And now what I can do to save my own life, especially depending on how many changes you made, I can come up and do a File, Save As, and come back in here. Now, it might not let me save right here because this is the open file. But then I can come in and say V1 and hit Save. And by doing that, now take a look. Look what I've got under my file. I've got the old original that was saved just now as V1. I've got the original that I was working on, and I've got V2. And now, you know, if I've got a duplicate, I could delete and rename if I need to, but I've got the old version back. Yes. I made that mistake myself a few times. I want to make sure you understand that you can save yourself if you make that mistake, especially if you've got AutoSave on. You can go to version history. Now get this. It doesn't just work in Microsoft Word. Let's go to PowerPoint, into the PowerPoint I'm actually using, and notice I can come up here. This is my YouTube video cover. This is what I use when I do my new YouTube videos. Let's hit version history, and here's all the versions, and I can go back in a period of time back to a previous version and open one of those files or documents to go back to a previous version of this file. Let's see what happens if I click on the one from September 2nd. And it's taken a second and it's reloading it. When I did my Killer Clipboard Trick video, uh, I'll put a link to that in my comments. And, uh, let's go back over here to Microsoft Excel. Like, take a look at this. So this is one of my Excel spreadsheets. Um, let me open this up just a little bit bigger this way so you see this better. Right here at the top, once again, come up, Version History. And I can then open this up to see the previous versions of this that were out there. Got it? This is a lifesaver. It allows you to have confidence turning on your autosave. It allows you to have confidence getting in and working on files. But if you make that mistake of forgetting to rename the file as soon as you open it when you're going to use it for something else, you're still okay. As long as you've got it saved in the latest version of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Now, out of curiosity, I jumped out to my Google Drive. Let's go out to Drive and look at this document right here, my priorities document from 2017. Uh-oh, take a look at this right here at the top. Now I could go in and make changes, but look, last edit was on that date. Open version history. They've got it too. And I'm assuming that very similar capabilities in Docs, Sheets, and Slides. You can open it up and see when was the last time you opened this, edited this, made changes to this. Google's got it too. Learn how to use this tool. It can be a lifesaver in terms of you not losing work that you really wanted to keep just because you get too excited and start overwriting your own work. Got it? Alright. So let's finish this up. Hey, and you know what? Since I got the version history open, I can still use the one that I had because, hey, there it is. By the way, a couple things. I do have a new Patreon page. Would love to have you go check it out. And also, I'd like to thank you for your time. Once again, my name is Randall F. Dean. If you'd like to find out more about my programs, both full-length online intensive streaming programs on time, email, Outlook, Google, smartphone, tablet usage, go check out my website. Of course, obviously, if you like my videos, please like the video and subscribe. And if you even want to get a whole set of bonus little tip sheets, including including a YouTube cheat sheet for my YouTube channel so you can see what some of my other favorite tip videos are, send me an email randy@randalldean.com and put bonus PDF or actually YouTube PDF in the subject line. Either one will work. I'll get you the PDFs. Thanks everybody.
