One of the breakout features of the Google apps suite (docs, sheets, slides, etc) is the live collaboration features. Anyone can edit, comment, and suggest in real time.
This works beautifully, but when it comes to checking a past version, Google docs weirdly… sucks. To be fair, it has version history that captures every edit, all the way back to the creation of the document. That’s admirable. But the interface for checking version history is sluggish, confusing, and often more trouble than it’s worth.
I’m reminded that Google already solved this a better way with Google Wave nearly a decade ago. It was essentially a timeline that let you replay the changes as if you were watching a recording of them as they happened.
Instead, Google seems focused with generating named versions of a doc, I guess the idea being that you can see that the document was edited on July 21st by Jane Doe. The problem is that many docs could have dozens of edits over time – and just seeing a big list of them isn’t much help. It also doesn’t help that the loading of the past versions is painfully slow. Most of the time, I just don’t bother.
It all just gets in the way of, what I imagine is many users’ desire, to simply scrub through the past changes as they happen to find the specific moment an edit was made (and by whom).
I’d feel a lot better about clearing out old notes and fully committing to real time editing if I could rely on version history. But for now at least, that’s not in the cards.