Automatically Saving Versions

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated March 24, 2021)

As you pass a document file around to other people to work on, you may want Word to automatically save a version of your document every time it is closed. This is easy to do by following these steps:

Choose Versions from the file menu. Word displays the Versions dialog box. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Versions dialog box.

Make sure the Automatically Save a Version On Close check box is selected.
Click on Close to dismiss the Versions dialog box.

Remember that Word saves a version every time the file is closed. Thus, if the document is worked on in a lot of small sessions, it is very easy for the document to get very large very fast. To overcome this problem, make sure you review the versions periodically and delete those you no longer need. (Deleting a version is covered in a different tip.)

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1852) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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