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Friday, February 4, 2011

Discard Changes

So I am monkeying around with a small Google spreadsheet, just a table really, and I realize I have gone too far, and this scheme I am working on is not going to work. OK, fine, we'll just throw it away and go back to where we started.

Except we can't. Autosave has been turned on, and every change I have made has been dutifully saved in the originally "document". Gaack! What am I gonna do?

So I search help for "restore original", and I find this post on the forum:
Is there a way to cloase a google doc, such as a spreadsheet without saving it.
in which they talk all around the problem, ask a bunch of unimaginative questions, and then close the discussion without explaining the answer. But someone does mention revision history, although from this discussion it does not even look like there is such a thing. In any case, I stopped looking for DISCARD CHANGES and started looking for REVISION HISTORY, and that got me to where I needed to be.

The answer is that you can use the REVISION HISTORY under the FILE menu to restore a previous version. You click on Revision History, and it displays a list of versions in a sidebar. Click on any one of them and it will display it. At the same time an option will appear under this entry in the sidebar offering to restore this version. So once you have found the one you want, you can restore it, and all your changes since then will be DISCARDED, which is what I wanted in the first place.

I mean, how would you know there was such a thing as a Revision History unless you were looking for it? I mean I didn't want the Revision History, I just wanted to discard my changes.

Maybe we need two levels of spreadsheet programs. One for people who only want to use a simple spreadsheet occasionally, and one for people whose entire life is devoted spreadsheets.

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