Introducing edit history: Restore past versions of your visualizations

David Kokkelink

When you’re visualizing data, you make dozens of small and big decisions – from which chart type to use, to colors, headline, annotations, and so much more. But we all know that not every idea turns out great. Sometimes, you wish to go back in time. So far, you had to reverse the changes manually (taking more time than you have), or remember to create a duplicate of your visualizations before making big changes (ending up with five versions of one visualization in your archive). Not anymore.

To make sure you can always make changes with confidence, we’re introducing a new feature for all visualizations: the edit history.

Review and restore past versions of your visualizations

As you’re making edits to your visualization, Datawrapper now automatically keeps storing new versions of your chart, map, or table. This happens after every 30 edits, every time you publish your visualization, when you change the chart type, or when you stop editing for at least one minute. You can access all saved versions with the little Edit history option directly in the visualization editor:

Once you open the edit history, you can select any past version and preview how the visualization looked at that point in time. Then, with one click, you can either restore a past version, or duplicate into a new visualization as another starting point.

Easily revert to the last published version

Making edits after publication is a big time-saver with Datawrapper: simply make the change you want, and hit Republish to make your new version go live.

But in case you ever change your mind, you can now revert your visualization to the prior published state:

As Datawrapper’s edit history always includes all past published versions, you can easily reset your visualization to exactly the version that your readers see.

Access past versions for days, weeks or months

The edit history is now available for all Datawrapper teams and users, and Datawrapper will start storing versions of all your visualizations today. For customers on paid plans, longer version retention is available.

To start using Datawrapper’s edit history, simply open a visualization and make edits – everything else will happen automatically.

We hope you’ll find that live collaboration makes working together in Datawrapper even easier. Let us know if you have any questions or feedback at support@datawrapper.de.

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David Kokkelink

(he/him, @DavidKokkelink) is a co-founder and co-CEO of Datawrapper. Originally a software developer, he works across our customer-facing and product development teams to make sure Datawrapper is headed in the right direction. David lives in Berlin.

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