Full history recording

[Muzdrav]

Hello,
I would like to ask, if there is a way to record all changes in writer and calc:

Nowadays, when you start the record changes, the document saves the state of the document at that moment only.

Example 1:
I Have a writer document with hundreds of notes. I Start the recording. Have to write a new note:

Accumulator has to be pressured. After that, I select the whole sentence and change it’s color to red. Then, unknowingly, hit space and delete the sentence. Thanks to record, I can now track, that originally, the row was empty and now is empty again - tracking useless.

Example 2:
I Have a writer document with hundreds of notes. I Start the recording. I write a new note:

Accumulator has to be pressured to 15bar. After that I rewrite it to: Accumulator has to be pressured to 20bar. Then, I try to pressure the accumulator to 20bar and destroy it. Come back to notes and want to rewrite it back to the original value. Don’t remember the first written value. Thanks to record, I can now track, that originally, the row was empty and now is empty again - tracking useless.

I would have to “accept all the changes” and begin to record anew after each sentence. This way, I also loose the entire history of the changes (etc. losing original notes, re-rewritten notes or the unknowlingly deleted).

Is there a way to record all the changes ever made? I have a document with 600pages of notes and I sometimes delete a row or a word unkwnowlingly and this would help to recover it easely.

Thank you.
M.

[ajlittoz]

Unless I misuse the feature, my understanding is Track Changes compares document state between sessions. It is useful in collaborative work to compare editing made by other people. Track changes only gives the difference between the initial document state and the final state. There are no multiple versions.

I think you’re looking for the change history stack. It works within a session. Unfortunately, it is implement as a stack. You can’t access selectively a change without going through all the changes between it and the currect state.

The most recent change can be cancelled by pressing Ctrl+Z, unhiding the before-last change, etc.

This means if you want to revert the 10th previous change, you must revert the first nine recent changes (and somehow find a way to save them) before accessing this 10th change. And you must recreate the 9 changes you cancelled for access purpose.

There is also a File>Versions menu command but I don’t find it very practical. You can effectively record several versions of your document but only in a very linear way. If you revert to a previous version, all versions between this restored one and the current one are lost (and the changes in them too). Once again, it is “take-all-or-none”: you can’t choose which bits to restore and which bits to keep.