How to tell what's been customized

Question

I've been tasked with reviewing a number of pages within our sharepoint site, with a view to raising our quality standards. One of our quality standards is that all of the pages should use the standard template.

Many of them currently do not and display the banner message:

The current page has been customized from its template. Revert to template.

I can find plenty of questions on the web at large from people looking to hide this banner, but I can't find any that ask a simple question:

Before hitting the Revert to template link, how do I find out what has been customized on this page?

The system must know this information (how else would it be able to perform the revert?) and I don't want to risk losing something valuable if it turns out that the customization was important.

Answer 1

Unless you have access to the SharePoint servers and can use the Server Side object Model, then you have to use SharePoint Designer (Which probably also was the tool used to customize the pages).

Here is a way to find the changes (but it's hard work):

1. Open the site in SharePoint Designer
2. For each customized Page (which has a blue information icon next to it)
   1. Select the page
   2. Copy
   3. Paste (create new page with original name + '_copy(1)')
   4. Select the newly create page
   5. Right click and select 'Reset to Site Definition' (Accept dialog). This reverts the copy(1), but also creates a copy(2)
   6. Right click original and select 'Open with | Notepad'
   7. Right click copy(1) select 'Open with | Notepad'
   8. Delete copy(1) and copy(2)
   9. Save the content of the two notepads and compare using your favorite diff tool