Office 365 – SharePoint Online – Compare different versions of a document.

Most likely you are aware that it is possible to have version control on SharePoint libraries. Most likely you will also know how to get to the Version History option in the document libraries once it has been enabled: 

But when you look at the version history overview, wouldn’t it be really helpful if you could compare versions?

I rememebr that quite a while back when I was using an older version of SharePoint we used to have something to compare versions of documents.

Today I tried to look for this option and I couldn’t find it. So within the Version history  I looked at the View option of a previous version

But this didn’t give me much useful information:

Then I clicked on the link of the 3.0 version of my document. This now gives me a download/open option for the document.

Then I opened the document and my version 3 of my document is now opened

And finally I’m getting the option that I’m looking for. Compare the document and I can even restore the document.

Being a techy I now also want to know what the document is that I’ve just opened. I had the feeling that version 3 of the document was downloaded but actually the version is just opened from the original location. I went to the Save as option in Word and I tried to navigate to the location of the document

This is now showing the location of the original file in an error message. I’m not worried that I can’t open the location, I’m only after trying to find out where my current document lives. So it looks like SharePoint keeps multiple copies of the same file within my document library.

Ok, back to my original subject of this post. I’m clicking on the compare option in Word and I’m getting a nice overview of the changes made to my document.