How to View the Change History of a Cell in Google Sheets

How to View the Change History of a Cell in Google Sheets: Some users need to track their changes on a sheet in Google Sheets. This situation is especially common when multiple participants are interacting with a spreadsheet. There is a general tool for viewing and restoring versions, and recently the developers have introduced a function for tracking the history of changes to the selected cell, which I will also talk about in this article.

Viewing Document Version History

Let’s start with the already familiar feature of the general view of document versions, because thanks to it you can get more detailed information and restore one of the versions if necessary. I will immediately note the main disadvantage of this tool, which I also encountered on my own – problems with loading large amounts of data. Huge tables sometimes take a very long time to load, or the tab stops responding altogether for a while. Undoubtedly, it depends on your processor and the amount of RAM – the more powerful the computer, the better.

1. Open the sheet you want to track and click on the link “Last changes”.
2. A block with version histories will appear on the right. They all have a date, time, and information about which users made the changes. Each of the users has a different color, which means that the cells changed by him will also be highlighted in the same color.
3. Sometimes many revisions are made on the same day, so you will need to expand the list and choose the time that suits.
4. View the number of changes and switch between them to see which cells are highlighted. Compare several different versions to understand what has been added or removed.
5. If necessary, the current version, which is currently being viewed, can be restored by clicking the corresponding button.

Such a viewer is large and informative, but not always useful when it comes to the need to analyze just one cell. Sometimes it simply cannot be found among the entire list of editions. In such cases, I advise you to turn to the second function, which was added relatively recently.

View changes to a single cell

At the time of this writing, the “Show Change History” option in the cell’s context menu is still marked as “New” , which means it was added very recently, and many do not yet know that it exists. However, the tool is quite handy and can be useful. Interaction with it is carried out as follows:

1. Select the cell whose changes you want to track, and then right-click on it.
2. From the context menu that appears, select Show Change History.
3. The tool shows which user made the change, when and what exactly he added, edited or deleted.
4. Use the arrows to switch between versions.
5. If you return to the original state of the cell, the line “No more changes”will appear .

Unfortunately, it will not work to roll back one cell to any version, so you will have to manually edit it in accordance with the previous options, if you suddenly need it. Summing up, it can be noted that the function is really useful and takes the user much less time when compared with a full view of document versions.