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About this lesson

Learn how to work with version control, restore old versions, and convert minor versions to major versions. 

Quick reference

Version Control

Version control helps us keep track of the different iterations a document goes through and restore previous versions if required. 

When to use

Keeping track of versioning is helpful whenever a document is being modified and updated by lots of people as it allows us to view the document during each step of the modification process and roll back changes if required. 

Instructions

We can specify if we want to keep track of major versions or major and minor versions. A major version of a document would be 'version 2' whereas a minor version would be 'version 2.1'. 

Review Versioning Settings

  • From the document library, click the cog icon in the top right-hand corner. 
  • Click Library Settings. 
  • Click Versioning Settings. 
  • From the Document Version History section, select Create major versions. 

Adding a Version Column to the Library View

To keep track of a document's version, it's helpful to add a version column to the library view. 

  • From the document library, click All Documents. 
  • Select Edit current view. 
  • Place a checkmark next to the Version column. 
  • Click OK. 

We can now see the version number for each file in the document library. 

  • Click on a document that has multiple versions. 
  • Click the three dots and select Version history. 

Now we can see all versions of the document. Click on the link to see a preview of the document version. 

Restoring an Older Version

  • Click the drop-down arrow next to the relevant version and select Restore.   

The restored version doesn't overwrite any existing versions. The restored version will be assigned the next version number.  

Creating Minor Versions

  • Click the cog icon and select Library Settings.
  • Click Versioning Settings. 
  • From the Document Version History section, select Create major and minor versions. 
  • Click OK. 
  • Go back to the document library. 
  • Open one of the documents and make a small change. 
  • Close the document. 

Look at the new version number for this document. Instead of a major version e.g. 5, we now have a minor version e.g. 5.1. 

Converting Minor Versions to Major Versions

Minor versions are used when a document is in its draft stage and lots of small changes are occurring. We can convert a minor version to a major version.

  • Hover the mouse over the document and click the three dots. 
  • Select More from the menu. 
  • Click Publish. 
  • Add comments if required.
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  • 00:04 Now I mentioned this a little bit earlier on, but
  • 00:07 it's now time to circle back around and talk about versioning in more detail.
  • 00:12 I want to relate this back to something that you might have used before.
  • 00:16 Many companies out there usually have some kind of network drive,
  • 00:20 internal network drive I should say.
  • 00:23 That might be the M drive, the P drive, the O drive, and
  • 00:26 it's a centralized location where you can store files where everybody in your team,
  • 00:31 your department or even your organization have access to those files.
  • 00:36 But if you're using something like a network drive,
  • 00:39 how do we tackle versioning?
  • 00:41 Because documents are changing all the time,
  • 00:43 particularly if they've been shared with numerous different people.
  • 00:47 If you have 50 people that have access to a network drive,
  • 00:50 anyone of those 50 people could go in and start making changes to a document.
  • 00:55 And in this day and age we really want to be keeping track of all of the changes
  • 01:00 that are occurring on our documents.
  • 01:02 And also have the ability to roll back to previous versions if we make a mistake.
  • 01:08 So while network drives don't offer versioning capabilities,
  • 01:13 what I've tended to see people do is when they make a change to a file,
  • 01:18 they might rename that file to V1, V2, V3 so on and so forth.
  • 01:23 But it's not a particularly efficient way of working.
  • 01:26 You'll find that when you're dealing with versions in SharePoint,
  • 01:30 it is a lot easier and simpler.
  • 01:33 And we took a look at our versioning settings a couple of lessons ago.
  • 01:37 And I showed you that I currently have my library settings set to
  • 01:41 create major versions.
  • 01:43 So when I make some changes and save, it's going to be version 2,
  • 01:48 version 3 or version 4, so on and so forth.
  • 01:51 So for this example, we're going to work within the Documents library.
  • 01:55 And something I'm going to add,
  • 01:57 I'm going to add another column that's going to make my life a little bit easier.
  • 02:01 I'm going to add a column that shows me the version of each of these documents.
  • 02:05 So the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to jump up and
  • 02:08 I'm going to edit the current view.
  • 02:11 And I'm going to scroll through my different columns and
  • 02:15 I'm going to say that I want to display the Version column.
  • 02:19 Let's scroll down to the bottom and click on OK.
  • 02:24 And now I can see how many versions of each document I have.
  • 02:29 So let's take a look at one of these documents that has quite a few versions.
  • 02:33 So something like this Rollout Plan.
  • 02:35 Now if I hover over this document and click those three dots,
  • 02:39 which is going to open up that very long contextual menu,
  • 02:43 I have a menu item in here which is going to let me see the version history.
  • 02:48 So if I click this on this specific document,
  • 02:51 I'm going to be able to see all four versions of that document.
  • 02:55 I can click on the link to take a look at the document in each of its different
  • 02:59 iterations.
  • 03:01 And if maybe I determined that version 4, which is the current version,
  • 03:06 has maybe got an error in it or I didn't want to change anything,
  • 03:10 I can roll back to version 3 very simply.
  • 03:13 If I go down to version 3 and click the little drop down,
  • 03:16 I can choose to restore this version.
  • 03:18 And when I click Restore, take a look at what happens.
  • 03:24 It doesn't overwrite the version 4,
  • 03:27 it just creates a brand new version, version 5, but the contents,
  • 03:32 the file is going to be in the state it was in when we were at version 3.
  • 03:37 Now if I close this window down, and just for
  • 03:40 one second I'm going to go back into my library settings.
  • 03:46 Because what I want to do here is I want to change my versioning settings,
  • 03:50 so that when I make a change to a document,
  • 03:53 I'm not just creating major versions I'm also creating minor versions as well.
  • 03:58 So a minor version would be 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, so on and so forth.
  • 04:05 Minor versions are pretty good if a document is in its draft stages.
  • 04:09 So maybe there's some minor changes going on which don't require you to save it as
  • 04:14 a brand new version.
  • 04:16 You could save it as a minor version and then once all of the minor changes have
  • 04:20 been approved, you can then save that as a major version.
  • 04:25 Now let's not get too far ahead of ourselves,
  • 04:28 let's just select create major and minor versions and click on OK.
  • 04:34 So now let's jump back to our document library.
  • 04:37 I'm going to open Rollout Plan and I'm just going to make a bit of a change.
  • 04:42 Let's just add Hello World into the top.
  • 04:46 So I've changed the document.
  • 04:49 Let's close it back down again and take a look at Rollout Plan now.
  • 04:54 It's version 5.1, because I selected to use major and minor versions.
  • 05:00 Now if you decide that you now want to convert your minor version to
  • 05:05 a major version, all you need to do is click the three dots,
  • 05:10 go down to more and select Publish.
  • 05:13 I can type in some comments about what has changed.
  • 05:15 So I could say Added Hello World and click on Publish.
  • 05:22 And you can see now that has changed it to a major version, version 6.

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