Google Docs Tutorials – Part 14 - Word Count & Revision History
Learn how to use the Google Documents Word Count and Revision History tool.
There are other useful tools available in the Tools menu. Place your cursor anywhere within your document, and then go to the Tools menu, and select Word Count (as shown to the right)
As seen below, this tool will show you a great deal of information about your document, such as how many words you have in your document, how many characters (with no spaces), how many characters (with spaces), how many paragraphs, the number of sentences, and more. To close, click the Done button.
Another useful option in the Tools menu is the Revision history. When you select it, you will see a new window open that has a list of the different revisions of your document (see below). This is very useful if you are sharing a document or working on a document with other people. You can use this tool to see what changes have been made in the document or to revert to an older version of your document.
To compare multiple versions of the same document, click the check box next to the revisions that you want to compare. In this example, Revision 3 and Revision 72 have been checked (see pictured to the right). If you are satisfied with your chosen revisions, click the Compare Checked button. As you can see below, Google Docs will open a new window that marks the changes between the two different revisions of your document.
Basically, the example below demonstrates a comparison between the very first version of the Banana Tree document, or the earliest version of the document, with the latest revision.
In the earliest version of this document, there was only one sentence typed at the very top. As you can see above, by the latest revision of the Banana Tree document, that sentence has been removed, and a great deal of new information added to the document. Google Docs represents these changes by crossing out any text that has been deleted between the first and last revision, and by highlighting any text that has been added. As you can see, many changes were made in this document. To return to the revision history, click the link Back to Revision History.
In some instances, you may find that the revisions you had made seem to be gone. But they are not really gone, rather they are grouped together. If you click on the revisions link again, you will see all of the different revisions that you saw before. Click the Back to editing link, and you are back to your document.
You have seen that Word Count and Revision History are two useful tools that are available in Google Docs.
