Ignore Previous Value is a check box that will appear on every condition of type "control" that you have created in the Workflow Manager.For more information about the Workflow Manager, click
here.
Whenever a record is changed, the workflow process will check to see if this specific condition is met for that record. When checking the condition, there are two available records that the process can utilize:
1. The previous record. (before the record was changed)
2. The current, updated record. (after the record was changed)
With this information, each condition has two checks:
1) Check to see if the previous value and the current value are different
2) Check to see if the condition for the current value is met
When you check "Ignore Previous Value", you are telling the system to skip the first check and only do the second check.
This is a very important concept for Workflows, especially when there are multiple conditions for one process. In this example, let's say that the Name field had been "John" both before, and after the record changed. Let's say that when the record was changed, the Stage field happened to go from "New" to "Sold". Thus, when the condition ran, the values would still match (Check 2), but according to Check 1, the previous value of Name ("John") will still be the same. Therefore, even though Stage now equals "Sold", and Name equals "John", the condition will not pass, because Check 1 did not pass. In this case, we would want to tell the system to ignore the fact that Name hasn't changed, and just check to see if it still matches "John".