Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Dear Developers,

Is it possible to save the Undo history to files in future versions of OpenOffice, so that the undo history remains after saving and closing the file?
What usually happens is if you save the file and close the program, all the undo history is gone. If I accidentally deleted a bunch of text unknowingly before saving and closing, then all that text is irretrievable. That happened to me once and it took me a couple of hours to redo the work. I've also had several more instances where I accidentally deleted a bunch of text, but was able to undo because I had not saved and closed, so that was lucky.

But if the Undo history is kept with the file, then you could undo that deletion and rescue the work, even though you've saved and closed.

Note that this is a user forum and we don't get developers visiting here - or if they do, they are incognito

That said, this feature was requested some years ago but nothing has eventuated yet. You might want to add your vote to the request, but I don't think you should hold your breath.

As a work-around, see if Track Changes might offer you anything useful.

I suppose it the Undo List is a global feature, but assigned to a specific file. Read: a Ctrl-X in one file and a Paste in an another file will modify two files.
And you can set the number of Undoes in the settings - Globally: it can be 100 or more up to 9999.
Saving the all of Undoes (note: you can paste a whole huge document by one single Paste step!) would significantly increase the size of the document file.

I just checked it:

The setting "Undo count" is not present on the UI of the newer LibreOffice versions. It is available in the Advanced settings list (it is a Registry like list) You can see it is a Common property but not assigned to a specific Document nor a specific Application:

Tools > Options > Load/Save > Create backup copy ..., keeps the previous version of fred.odt as C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice\4\user\backup\fred.bak and may help.

Zizi64 wrote:I suppose it the Undo List is a global feature, but assigned to a specific file. Read: a Ctrl-X in one file and a Paste in an another file will modify two files.
And you can set the number of Undoes in the settings - Globally: it can be 100 or more up to 9999.
Saving the all of Undoes (note: you can paste a whole huge document by one single Paste step!) would significantly increase the size of the document file.

I just checked it:

The setting "Undo count" is not present on the UI of the newer LibreOffice versions. It is available in the Advanced settings list (it is a Registry like list) You can see it is a Common property but not assigned to a specific Document nor a specific Application:

UndoCount.png

It seems like MS Word doesn't save the Undo history either which is quite a shortcoming in our digital age. But quite typical of MS that when there isn't good competition against their software, development drops off and they rest on their laurels.

I agree saving all the Undo history will increase the file significantly. I suppose there should be an option to toggle it on/off, and perhaps there should be a function to clear the undo history from the file when needed, particularly if you're sharing the file and don't want others to know the deleted material or to reduce the file size.