"Sometimes not a number"

[Baldgyt]

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"The Version column in SharePoint Views is sometimes not a number column. If you sort it, version 12 shows up in between version 1 and 2."- - what does sometimes mean?

I know that version is a mess in SharePoint - there seems to be site column which I can also add to my library and one that is called version that appeared when I turned on versioning. Neither are accessible with word - and the dance with labels documented elsewhere is unreliable. It seems that every article about versioning is vague using words like "sometimes" (does the code use a random numebr generator?)

Document Details

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• ID: 6080b47a-816c-8bc8-94c0-506d040ae9bd
• Version Independent ID: c06f1880-827d-1d0b-c0fc-601432749411
• Content: Versioning in SharePoint
• Content Source: Community/versioning-basics-best-practices.md
• Service: sharepoint-online
• GitHub Login: @PatD
• Microsoft Alias: daisyfeller

[sympmarc]

Can you explain what your issues are with versioning?

Version numbers are created automatically by SharePoint. Each minor version is after the decimal, like the 2 in 1.2, and each major version is before the decimal, like the 2 in 2.0.

If you add the Version column to a view, you can sort by it, but that isn't very meaningful, in general. A document at version 3.0 might be older than a different document at version 1.8.

The settings for versioning vary by list or library and should be set to meet the requirements for the content. By default, document libraries have major versioning enabled, keeping up to 500 versions.