Documentation for Confluence 4.1.x. Documentation for earlier versions of Confluence is available too.

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Confluence tracks histories of changes to pages by maintaining a version of the page each time it is modified. It is easy to view changes between different versions and to restore a previous version if required.

On this page:

Accessing the Page History View

To view the history of a page:

  • Go to the page and choose Tools > Page History.

You can click a version number to view that version. To get back to the page history view, click View Page History.

Screenshot: Page History View

When you are viewing a specific version of the page, the following functions are available:

Function

Description

current version

View the latest version of the page.

Compare with Current

Compare the differences between the version of the page you are viewing and the current version.

Restore this Version

Restore the page version you are viewing to be the current version.

View Page History

Return to the list of page versions.

<< Previous or Next >>

View the previous or next page version, respectively.

Viewing Changes in a Page History

The page history view and page information view allow you to view recent changes made to a page or to compare the differences between any two versions of a page.

Viewing Recent Changes

To view recent changes made to a page:

  1. Click view change at the top of the page below the page title. The page comparison view is displayed, showing the differences between the current version and the previous version.
    Or:

  2. Choose Tools > Info to go to the 'Information' view for the page.

  3. In the section titled 'Recent Changes' you will see the most recent versions of the page, along with the date of their modification and the name of the modifying author.
  4. Click view changes beside the desired version. The page comparison view is displayed, showing the differences between the selected and previous versions.

Comparing Two Different Versions of a Page

To compare two different versions of a page:

  1. Go to the page and choose Tools > Page History.

  2. Select the versions you want to compare by selecting the check boxes beside them.
  3. Click Compare selected versions. The page comparison view is displayed, showing the text differences between the selected versions.

Page Comparison View

The page comparison view shows the differences between selected page versions.

Key

On the page comparison view, the following key indicates the differences between the selected page versions:

Highlight

Meaning

Green

Added content

Red

Deleted content

Blue

Changed formatting



Screenshot: Comparing Changes

Interactive views

When a page comparison view is first displayed, all large sections of unchanged text are hidden and reduced to an ellipsis . . ..

You can view page changes between versions which are adjacent to your current page comparison view. Click the link containing:

  • << to view the page comparison with the earlier adjacent version
  • >> to view the page comparison with the more recent adjacent version.

For example, if your page comparison view is between v. 30 and v. 34 of a page, you can view changes between:

  • v. 29 and v. 30 by clicking << Changes from 29 to 30
  • v. 34 and v. 35 by clicking Changes from 34 to 35 >>

Other Page History View Features

You can also use the page history view to:

Related Topics

Viewing Page Information
Working with Pages
Tracking Updates

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15 Comments

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  1. Mar 20, 2006

    Sriram Narayan

    If someone deletes a page, is there an audit trail? I was expecting something like a space history which will capture which page was deleted, when and by whom?

  2. Apr 06, 2006

    Brian Knorr

    When I add or remove a comment on a page why doesn't this get versioned? We would really like to have this functionality...is this possible with Confluence?

  3. Oct 29, 2009

    Sunny Lim

    Besides deleting a page, what about moving a page from one space to another space as well as renaming the page.

    1. Nov 30, 2009

      Amit Kumar

      See http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Moving+a+Page and http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Renaming+a+Page

  4. Nov 27, 2009

    Amit Kumar

    Hi,

    Is it possible to delete the old versions of the page? While working on wiki pages, we create many versions of a page and later only latest 10 versions makes sense to have. In this case is it possible to delete all old versions of a page.

    Regards.

    1. Jan 25, 2010

      Mark

      I would also be interested in deleting some page history of a page. There are time when information is entered and then deleted that should not remain in the audit trail due to confidentiality issues.

      Apparently this has been discussed for six years here:  http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-996

      1. Jan 25, 2010

        Gerhard Mueller

        We have written a plugin for our internal usage. Perhaps we could arrange something? The plugin needs some polising, though.
        Write to Gerhard dot Mueller at tngtech dot com (wink)

        1. Mar 31, 2010

          paulina

          I'm wondering how your plugin works and what, if any, issues you have had with it.

          Thanks.

    2. Mar 01, 2010

      Anonymous

      Yes, I would like to delete history sometimes too due to confidentiality. You can delete and recreate the page but then you have to re attach graphics, etc.

      1. Mar 01, 2010

        Anonymous

        Oh, but I think it DOES work to make a copy of the page, delete the old page, and then replace it with the copy. That brings attachments along.

        1. Jun 15, 2010

          Klaus Feldmann

          well…the copied page does still contain all original content, but using this procedure could mess up links.

          There is no doubt that a function to delete former versions is more convenient and secure than any other workaround.

          On the other hand Confluence as an system used to keep track of the communication that took place, such a function must be restricted to be used only by space administrators.

  5. May 10, 2010

    Bala Shanka

    Is it possible to retain the Author and history of the page, if we want to copy the page to a different space? There is too much information in one space, so we want to move few pages to a seperate space, but maintain the author and history information.

  6. Mar 24, 2011

    Anonymous

    Hello, Is is possible to have versions 1.00.001 and  1.00.002 instead of 1 and 2 ?

    Thanks,

    Velina

  7. Mar 28, 2011

    Anonymous

    Hi,

    When i am doing comparison of version and i am not able to see the changes and getting the followiinf error-

     Changes ($action.diffResult.numChanges)

    com.atlassian.confluence.diff.ConfluenceDiff@1747be3

    Can you please help me in this issue?

    Thanks,

    Saurabh Malik

  8. Jan 30, 2012

    artur assor

    Interactive views

    When a page comparison view is first displayed, all large sections of unchanged text are hidden and reduced to an ellipsis . . ..

    Is there a way to see the whole page with a diff - so that unchanged text is not hidden? sometime it's way too complicated to understand the changes without seeing the whole context. and if u go to see the context (viewing the last version) u loose the diff...