Google Sheets as part of Google’s Office suite has become one of the most widely used spreadsheet applications in the world by millions of users. Over the years, Google Sheets have been packed with so many features that make the user experience way better than any other spreadsheet application.
Among the crazy features like send an email when you comment or Cell data protection or Import data from the site or RSS feed or Email ID validation, Edit history is a great one especially if you are working with other people on the same spreadsheet. Since anybody who has access to a sheet can edit it whenever they want, it’s hard to keep track of what happened on the site. That’s why Edit History comes in handy to make sure that you don’t miss what happened.
Show Edit History helps to go back and see what happened to a particular cell in the past and who has done it and so on.
How to Check Edit History in Google Sheets
Show Edit History
Tracking Edit History by all the collaborators in the spreadsheet can be very useful to actually keep information transparency across the team or company. The changes made by whom and when can help you understand the flow of information better.
Previously, there was a feature called Version History which requires you to manually look through older versions of the sheet to see what exactly happened. But the current version of this feature lets you see the edit history of the particular cell. Three pieces of information will be shown like who edited the cell, when it was edited, and the previous value.
Previously, you would need to open up Version History and manually look through past versions of a sheet to determine who changed a cell and when. With Show edit history, you can quickly surface the edit history of a cell: who edited, when, and the previous value.
How to use it?
- Right-click on the cell you would like to see the edit history off.
- In the dialog box that appears, Choose the Show Edit History option.
- A popup appears next to the cell that you chose to see the history off as you can see here. The first time when you open it, it would show the last change that was made to the cell.
For Example, I entered ‘Version 1’ to the cell. After a couple of seconds, I changed it to ‘Version 2’ and then to ‘Version 3’.
As soon as I chose Show Edit History, this is what I saw.
Clicking on the left < arrow at the top right corner of the popup showed me this. As you can see at the bottom, the last action is mentioned clearly as “Replaced Version 1 with Version 2“.
After that, the first value ‘Version 1’ is show.
This is a newer version of the version History which is still there in Google Sheets. If you want to open that, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H. This would open up the version history of the entire sheet.
This is what you would see on the right side of the Version History. As you can see every edit version of the entire sheet could be seen clearly.
So, if you want to go back to a previous version, you could tap on the … icon near the version name. In the popup that appears, choose to Restore this version.
So, there’s almost very little chance that you might lose the data in a spreadsheet because of accidentally overwriting it over existing. Even if that happens you could go back, see the previous version of the cell or sheet and easily restore that version.
If you are still using Microsoft Excel, it’s big-time to move to Google Sheets to make use of these great features.
