How to undo a mistake in MS Word

You can tell Word to undo a mistake you’ve made and to change it back to what you wrote a few minutes ago. 

If you’ve made a mistake when writing, for example deleted a few paragraphs by accident, the first reaction may be to panic. How do I get it back? Do I have to write it all again?

One way to do this is to use the Undo feature in Word. This lets you go back in time, step by step, until you find the first version of the text you wrote.

Here’s how it works:       ctrl-z-blue.png

  1. In the Word document, press Ctrl and Z. This performs one Undo. It undoes the last edit you made to the document.
  2. Press Ctrl and Z. This performs another Undo. It undoes the second last edit you made.
  3. Continue to press Ctrl and Z to undo as many edits as you want.      

When you’ve found the text that you were after, save the document, preferably with some naming convention that makes sense to you, for example, June Report Draft 2.

Rather than keeping one version of a document, especially one you’ll re-write many times, save it with a different version number as you work on it. This avoids losing all your work if the document crashes, which can happen if you repeatedly format a document and make changes to its layout.

At the end of the project, delete the initial drafts, then create a Gold Copy of the final draft and save it in the Archives.