Editing Tool disaster

[Robert McN]

In 1996 I used Microsof Office to write a book and relied heavily on the
editing tool within MS Word. It worked great. Last week after finishing the
draft of my Ph. D. dissertation, I sent it to someone to edit it. I am using
Word 2002 and think the editor was as well. The program was a disaster.
First, the editing tool doesn't jump from one correction to the next,
requiring more work. Second, although the document had been protected, I
unprotected it so that I could enter my own edits. Instead it treated each
of my new changes as if they were revisions within the editing progam for a
protected doucment. In other words, every change I made, appeared in a
different color and underlined or with a strike through it. I have no idea
why. In the end, I didn't have the time to use the edits at all. It would
have been vastly more efficient to just use a pen and paper. Finally, I sent
it out to be printed. The "print what" always default to "document showing
markup," which means the document prints at about 2/3 its normal size. If
you write a single comment, it does this, which is maddening, never have I
wanted it to so print. Knowing it had this horrible feature, I specifically
saved as "Final," and sent it to the printer. The program overrode my
command and it defaulted back to "document showing markup" and so the print
run was unusable. I am really upset by this. Moreover, there is no manual
included with the program, and the on-disk help is pretty much useless. The
program worked better 10 years ago than it does today. Is there any way to
edit a document that will not lead to these frustrations?

 

[Jezebel]

Calm down and stop screaming. If you took a few minutes to read Help on the
Track Changes features you would have solved all of this in a few minutes.
If your changes are appearing in a different color and underlined, you have
'Track Changes' switched on. You're free to switch it off. You're also free
to accept the changes, in which case the Final/Showing mark-up issue
disappears. Etc.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You might also want to read
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/trackchanges/HowTrackChangesWorks.html

 

[Robert McN]

Dear Jezebel,
I'm sorry if it sounded as if I were screaming. I'm calm now and grateful
that you responded. I figured out what you were referring to, regarding the
switching on/off of the track changes. I think this is a change from the
earlier version. I don't see why you can "protect documents" for editing
without a password or "track changes" since both seem to do the same thing.
In any case, I see the point. However, the second point, which was just as
frustrating is that when printing, the program defaults to the "Pring
document showing markup." On several occasions this has led to needless
wasted paper, ink and time. I specifically saved it in "final" so that this
wouldn't happen, and still it defaulted to this format. Does that mean we
simply have always remind the copy centers if they receive a Word document to
check that the print status is "final?" Or is there some way to ensure that a
document will default to the "final" as I imagine most people would prefer?
Whether you have any response or not, thanks.
Bob

 

[Robert McN]

Thank you for pointing this out to me. Shauna Kelly's site is very helpful.
Best regards. Bob

 

[Jezebel]

The point of protecting the document is to prevent changes completely. The
idea of doing so with no password is that prevents inadvertent changes: the
user has to make a conscious decision, yes I want to make a change.

Word doesn't normally default to 'print showing mark-up'. If you don't use
the track changes feature at all, this simply isn't an issue.