MicrosoftWhen I'm dealing with Word and Excel documents, if I don't want extensive number of versions to be created in light of frequent auto-saves, I turn auto save off, by using the slide button in the upper left hand corner of the title bar. I may turn it back on later in the process, so I have some versions I can fall back to if necessary.
When I'm dealing with other document types, after I "finalize" a document, if I no longer care about prior versions, I copy the document to a second file name, and delete the original file. In doing this, I find that the historical versions don't get copied to the new copy of the file and the old versions are deleted with the original copy of the file.
This should be balanced against the benefits of keeping prior versions. If you ever get malware or ransomware that encrypts your files, it may be possible to recover the last unencrypted version of the file by having the version history available.
Finally, it is possible to selectively delete prior versions by using the web interface, looking at the version history, and selecting the versions you want to delete. This can free up some space that's unnecessarily being hogged up by unneeded versions, especially with very large files.
