If a person opens a Google Sheets document on Google Drive, peruses it thoroughly but does not change anything, would this generate a timestamp for that user?
Or looked at another way, if there is a timestamp for someone on a Google Sheet, does it guarantee that he changed something on the sheet, however minor or tiny, even if it was only inadvertently changing something and then putting it back. (I ask this because it seems impossible to ignore changes or close without saving on Google Drive, which you can do on Windows file system.)
Related question: I am a little bit familiar with the versions function in Google Sheets. Is there any easy way to tell, on a large, multi-tab spreadsheet, what has been changed from one version to another?
You can go to File > Version History > Show Version History and it will pull up a sidebar where you can drill down into each recorded version. Seems to be a very fine-grained edit history.
Thank you but that doesn’t really answer any of my actual questions. Sorry to be short, but I need to know these things. The document is too complex for me to go into the version history on spec to see what, if anything, was changed.
There’s the new Activity Dashboard, that tracks views, so you can compare that with the edit history.
If you see a timestamp in Version History, and select that entry, normally what I find is that the sheet says “Total <some number> edits” in the top right hand of the document. If it does that, then something has been edited, even if you don’t know where
FWIW I am not personally seeing any timestamp for multiple different views that I’ve made of various shared documents. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it COULDN’T generate a timestamp for view-only, but it doesn’t look like it was doing that pre-Activity-Dashboard.
I also note that using Activity Dashboard for the first time (which actually I did just then when I was looking at various sheets’ histories) you get a popup asking if you want to hide your viewing, which rather implies to me “you didn’t need to worry about this before, because we weren’t tracking views”
When (roughly) is the timestamp?
We don’t have Activity Dashboard installed or activated.
The timestamp was yesterday morning, although today there is no time just yesterday’s date. Does that make a difference?
Since, per Mr Dibble’s link, the Activity Dashboard upgrade was in March, if the activity was before then I’d be more likely to say ‘they probably edited it’. Very recent - it looks like it could just be tracking views
Do you have write permission for the document? Do you generally see the ‘this many edits’ indicator in the top right?