Saving Versions and Releases

When you are changing and maintaining an Excel workbook there are often periods during which it contains bugs and inconsistencies. It is important to make sure that other people do not use it and trust its results when it is in such a state. In addition, it is sometimes necessary to back out of changes that you have made, as it becomes obvious that they don't work or that they are not wanted.

Excel does not provide good facilities for handling these situations. Although there is a way of tracking changes, and undoing them if necessary, this only works on shared workbooks; and you can only make limited changes to these workbooks. In particular, as the Excel help system states,

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XLSior provides you with mechanisms for keeping backup versions of workbooks, snapshots that enable you to return to earlier copies, and for differentiating these from releases, copies that can be used in earnest by users.

The general concept is that the principal copy of a workbook, say wbook.xls, is the file that you work on as you update and maintain the workbook. This copy is not guaranteed to work, and should not be used by anyone who relies on the results. You save this copy frequently, using the usual File > Save command, or Ctrl+S. Doing so overwrites the previous copy in the usual way.

Sometimes you find that you have made changes that don't work, and you want to return to an earlier version. Because you save often, so as not to lose your work, this is difficult unless you have used the XLSior > Save > Save Version command. This command saves a copy of the current workbook using a special name, effectively taking a snapshot of the current state. If you do this before you start making a change, you will always be able return to the earlier state, or the last known working version.

When you have finished making a change and run all your tests, you may want to make a copy that other people can use. You can do this through the XLSior > Save > Save Release command. Again, this command saves a copy of the current workbook using a special name. Other people should only ever use these release copies. In fact, they should never change these directly, but should take a copy before making any changes. In this way you will be able to keep track of which version of the workbook has been used for any purpose.

Whenever you save a version or release copy using XLSior, a record is kept in the original workbook of the name of the copy that was saved, when it was saved and who saved it. You can also add a comment describing the purpose of the copy or what changes it includes. The record is kept on worksheet X~Versions. You should not edit this sheet; it is protected in order to stop you doing so.

You cannot save versions or releases of shared workbooks.

Related topics

Making a version copy

Making a release copy