I still remember the worst day of my life. I had completed the first chapter of my very first book, and I decided that the finished file would make a good template for subsequent chapters. I meticulously deleted all the text, kept the various headings in place, and then clicked Save instead of Save As. I closed Word before I realized I had nuked a week’s worth of work. If I had been running the free add-in Autohistory, Word world have saved a unique version of my document with each click of the Save button.
Autohistory adds itself to the View tab of Word 2007 and creates a backup of your current document each time you click Save — not unlike professional content management solutions that feature complete revision history management. At any time, you can see a list of all the saved versions of your file, complete with the date and time each was created.
By default, all these Word files are stored in a hidden folder, but unfortunately that doesn’t keep all the revisions from polluting your desktop search results. You can specify a different save location, though — which you should, pronto — as well as a maximum number of saves if you’re worried about storage space. You can also compare versions of your document to see what’s changed. Autohistory is a godsend for anyone who spends a lot of time creating documents in Word. [via ghacks]
