Does Word 2013 have version control?

Question

In Word 1997 to 2007, there was a feature that saved document versions. Word 2010 does not have this feature. Did Word 2013 restore it?

Answer 1

File → Info → Versions → Manage Versions is where it's at in 2010. I don't have 2013, but I have to imagine it'd be the same.

Answer 2

You're probably looking for the Always create a backup copy feature in Word Options > Advanced

It'll create a backup file every time you save.

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However Windows already had support for previous versions, no need for office itself to have version control. From Windows 8 onward the feature has been replaced with File History

Still you do need to set up that first before it backs up your file

If you're using OneDrive then you can also use its history feature

Answer 3

Versioning is available for all documents stored in OneDrive. In fact, it works just as it used to in Word. You see the document stack with the latest version on the top, but you can restore an earlier version, which moves the restored version to the top of the stack.

If you don't have problems with storing documents online, simply use OneDrive... or use OneDrive selectively as part of your content creation process. Plus, it preserves versions for Excel and PowerPoint.

Answer 4

As noted, Windows has support for previous versions of files. From the look of the posted screenshot, that was taken from XP or Win7?

I've only tried this on Windows 10, but if you want to version control files without storing them on the cloud (and requiring a network connection, which would be iffy in the middle of an ocean on a life raft, for example), the Win10 File History feature should work for this task. If you're running Office on Mac, Time Machine should do that for you. I think on both platforms, you can adjust the frequency of the versioning to as often as every hour. And the file system type should not be an issue. The versions would then store incrementally (Time Machine does this, not quite sure how compact File History is as I've only been using it for several months).

This, rather than application or file specific version control, is more than what this question asks, but should address the need with a more comprehensive backup alternative. Office would still save the auto-recover version of a file by default, so one would then have regular time-stamped (e.g., hourly) versions of the file in addition to the last auto-recover save from Office.