Keeping vertical bars on subsequent document Track Changes

[John]

I'm new to Track Changes even though I am a veteran Word Document user.
Experiencing Track Changes for the first time in a new job.

What I want to do is to retain the vertical bars i.e. change lines after
making another round of changes. For example, suppose I am tasked with a
Revision 1 document file and need to make changes to that file. Then the
document becomes a new saved file as Revision 2 having changes either new
ones or the ones superceded. The problem I see is when I accepted the new
changes, I've lost my vertical bars. I want to keep them as permanent part
of the document. How do you keep them?!?!

I am getting very exasperated on how to understand Track Changes. The Word
Help or the Tutorial does not even address on how to handle the vertical
bars.

The Word version I'm using is MS Office 2003. Any help will be greatly
appreciated. Please include step by step as well the crucial tool that may
be among the pull down menus that I can't find but very hard to find or
overlooked.

Thanks much in advance.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

The vertical bars indicate the presence of tracked changes. Once accepted,
tracked changes go away. That's how it works.

Suppose I type:

This is a test.

Someone comes along in tracking mode and edits it to:

This is an exam. (n exam was added, and "test" shows in strikethrough)

There would now be a vertical bar to help you zoom in on where the changes
are. You then accept the changes, and the tracking disappears.

That's how it works -- and it's how most of use want it to work.

Why would you want previously-accepted tracked changes to continue to
display in the document? In my experience, the document would become
hopelessly difficult to interpret. Moreover, maintaining many layers of
changes is very memory intensive, and Word begins to perfrom more
sluggishly.

You can--rather than accepting changes--change your Word user name and edit
tracked changes. Those changes will be another layer, and both will show up
(or, you can tell Word to show changes from any combination of different
reviewers). So, in theory, you can do what you appear to want to do. But,
rather than accepting changes, you need instead to edit those changes as a
different user... if I'm understanding correctly.