Extracting Word revision log

[Isa Muqattash]

Hi,

I am working with some c++ code, and need to find a way to extract the
revision log information from a word document programatically. Two question
that I would be very appreciative if someone can shed some light:

1) It appears that Office 2003 seems corrupt the revision log of documents
created in an earlier version of Office. Also, Office 2003 seems to not
create a new entry into the log when doing a "Save As". Has anyone else
experienced these issues?

2) Does the revisions log support Unicode? I am looking at the binary of a
couple files and see that for docs without Unicode data, every character
takes up two bytes, with the second byte being a 00. I am guessing this is
due to storing each character as a WCHAR.

Thanks for all the help!

 

[Isa Muqattash]

Hi everyone,

Any insight please! The answer does not have to be in C++; VBA or even a
macro will do me just as good.

Thanks again for your help!
Isa

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Isa

I'm guessing that the reason no-one has responded to your post in some
days is that we're not sure what you need.

Word has no "revision log".

Are you talking about Versions? If so, use the Document.Versions
collection. Or perhaps you need Track Changes. If so, use the
Document.Revisions collection.

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Isa Muqattash]

Hi Shauna,

Thanks for the response, and sorry for not being clear enough. Basically I
am looking to extract the list of pairs (authors and the save as path that
they specified). I know you can see this info if you open a .doc by selecting
the "Recover Text from Any File" open option in Word. This is what I meant
when by "revision logs". How can I get this information programatically?

Thanks!
Isa

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Isa

That information was included in the binary .doc format in Word 2000 and
earlier versions, but was removed in the 3 latest versions of Word. In
any case, it was never exposed outside Word. That is, you could not get
to that information programatically.

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Isa Muqattash]

Hi Shauna,

This is of great help. The other question that I have is did this data ever
support Unicode data for the author or save path? If so, will each byte of
the wchar be followed by a zero byte of padding? Ie, if you look at the
binary and expect to see unicode character 0xA 0xB, then will the binary show
0xA 0xB or will it show 0xA 0x0 0xB 0x0??

Thanks for all the help!
Regards,
Isa

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Isa

Sorry, I don't know the answer to that. I would be astonished if it were
documented anywhere. Like many things in Word, you'll just have to
experiment, I think.

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Isa Muqattash]

Thanks Shauna, you are of great help!

Regards,
Isa