Administrative Assistant's Update

3 Administrative Assistant's UPDATE Microsoft Office document versioning By Arnold Villeneuve Have you ever worked long hours on a document only to lose all the changes you recently made? That has happened to everyone at some point whether it be with Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents. Traditionally people save documents as document_name_ v1.docx, document_name_v2.docx, etc. While it works, this approach makes for inefficient use of disk space, especially on the network server shared folders. There has to be a better way. In fact, there are two modern ways to use the concept of document versioning in a Microsoft environment that benefit the end user and also make efficient use of computing resources. • Office 365 document versioning with OneDrive • SharePoint collaboration platform document versioning Document Versioning OneDrive or SharePoint OneDrive for Business offers the ability to store files on the Microsoft cloud. One can access them from multiple computers or devices. Your documents can be shared. This product differs from the consumer version of OneDrive in that it is an enterprise-grade solution that uses your work account as opposed to your personal account. Think of OneDrive the same way you use a corporate shared folder that your department might use, but instead of being on premise, documents are stored in the Microsoft cloud. SharePoint, on the other hand, is a team-based collaboration platform solution which supports document management features such as Content Approval, Versioning and Check-In/Check-Out features. Both OneDrive and SharePoint use Document Libraries. Document Libraries support document management features so you can take advantage of them to automatically have versions of your document created as you work on them. By leveraging OneDrive or SharePoint (on-premise or online) you can have your documents stored in two locations so that if there are issues with your on-premise storage you have a fallback storage area to retrieve any version of your document. The synchronization from your local storage (C: drive, network shared folder) is done in the background. Never Lose a Document or Document Version Again You can use versioning to: • Track document version history When versioning is enabled, you can see when an item or file was changed and who changed it. You can also see when information about the file was modified. If someone changes the due date of a document, that change appears in the version history. Comments people make when they check files into libraries can also be viewed. • Restore a previous document version You can replace the current version with a previous one if you made a mistake in a current version, the current ver- sion becomes corrupt, or even because you like a previous version over the current one. When you restore the previ- ous version, it becomes the current one. • View a previous document version You can always view or even compare a previous version without overwriting your current version. When viewing version history within a Microsoft Office document (Word or Excel), you can compare the two versions to determine what the differences are. That is a very helpful feature. Talk with your IT/IM Team today about leveraging document versioning within your organization! Arnold Villeneuve Arnold Villeneuve has over 25 years in the computer technology and services industry working with standalone and networked microcomputers, minicomputers, and mainframe systems. He has been an author and Instructor with Learning Tree International since 1993, where he has developed seven courses for instructor- led, computer-based training, and e-learning initiatives.

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