Change the author of selected comments

[John Wirt]

A colleague at work wants to make the author of all the comments in a merged
document the same (don't ask me why.; this is what he wants to do). He
doesn't have control over the names they use in the User Information setup.

Could I do this in VBA by,

1. forming a collection of all revisions in the ActiveDocument by a given
author
2. reassign the author's name of all these revision to a preset
name/initials.
3. repeat, starting at #1, for all the authors of revisions in the document
4. create a list of all the authors by at worst enumeration to identify
unique values

John

 

[Andrew Savikas]

Hi John,

I assume when you say "comments," you mean "revisions" (tracked changes). The Revision.Author property is read-only, so is difficult to manipulate. With comments, on the other hand, you can change the Author and Initial properties directly from VBA

ActiveDocument.Comments(2).Author = "New Name
ActiveDocument.Comments(2).Initial = "xyz

There is a "back door" method for changing the author of revisions (tracked changes). Save the file to RTF, open it up in a text editor, and look for

{\*\revtbl {Unknown;}{Homer Simpson;}{Bart Simpson;}{Lisa Simpson;}

Just change the names as you need to.

** WARNING ** -- RTF is an extremely exacting syntax; accidentally deleting one of those curly braces will probably crash Word when you try to open it. Just be careful

HTH
Andrew Savika

----- John Wirt wrote: ----

A colleague at work wants to make the author of all the comments in a merge
document the same (don't ask me why.; this is what he wants to do). H
doesn't have control over the names they use in the User Information setup

Could I do this in VBA by

1. forming a collection of all revisions in the ActiveDocument by a give
autho
2. reassign the author's name of all these revision to a prese
name/initials
3. repeat, starting at #1, for all the authors of revisions in the documen
4. create a list of all the authors by at worst enumeration to identif
unique value

Joh

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi John,

Whether you can change this information within Word (as opposed to the RTF
approach, which would also work with WordML) depends on the version of word
involved. Word 2003 would support looping through and changing the Author, for
example.

A colleague at work wants to make the author of all the comments in a merged
document the same (don't ask me why.; this is what he wants to do). He
doesn't have control over the names they use in the User Information setup.

Could I do this in VBA by,

1. forming a collection of all revisions in the ActiveDocument by a given
author
2. reassign the author's name of all these revision to a preset
name/initials.
3. repeat, starting at #1, for all the authors of revisions in the document
4. create a list of all the authors by at worst enumeration to identify
unique values

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep 30 2003)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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