Recent Documents In Word 2010

If you’ve been working on a Word 2010 document that you have shared with someone and they have made changes to it in the Word Web App, beware! In your Recent Documents list you will see a version of the document that is stored on your hard drive or network, and in addition you will also see a version of the Word Web App document. These documents may be different!

Sharing Documents

Consider the situation where you create a document using the desktop version of Office Word 2010 and then decide to share it with your intrepid and daring colleague who volunteered to report on the mud wresting finals in California. You laid out the rough itinery in the initial document and then you uploaded it to SkyDrive for your colleague to edit and update (learn how to save a document in Word 2010 to SkyDrive). Your colleague makes their changes and then saves them to the same location in SkyDrive.

The next day, you want to see what’s been added to the document. How do you find the most recent version of the document?

Recent Documents

Ordinarily, you might use the Recent Documents section in the Backstage View. However, when you click the File tab > Recent, there are two documents with the correct file name at the top of the list. Which one should you choose? One item in the list will refer to the initial document you created in Word 2010, while the other will refer to the Word Web App version. The path to the document appears under the name of the document, and the web version will have a path that looks like https://obh7ij.docs.live.net/621dsew320ffg/Sample Documents. It actually looks like a web address, or URL. The version you edited in Word, on the other hand, will have a path that relates to the folder structure on your hard drive, for example My Documents\Office Web Apps. These paths refer to two different documents. If you know that your colleague made changes after you last saved the document, you should open the web version.

Opening the document is as simple as clicking on it. When you click on the web version, you will be asked to log in to your SkyDrive account, if you haven’t already. Opening the web document will take a lot longer than opening the document stored on your hard drive because Word has to establish a connection with your SkyDrive account and then download it to your computer. Whenever you are performing actions in SkyDrive, remember that you may need to be patient.

After you have opened the web version in Word, you will find that the web version disappears from the Recent Documents list, removing future confusion.

Make sure you open and work on the right document!