Markup Won't Stay Hidden!

[bonehead]

Greetings,

Office Pro Word 2003 sp1, Windows XP sp2:

My users have brought me a document which has been swapped between
multiple users and edited with a significant amount of markup, including
comments and highlighting. The users would now like to distribute the
document in a state that forces it to open showing the final text only,
without showing any of the markup.

In Help there is an article entitled “About displaying tracked changes
and comments” which states:

“If you hide a type of markup by clearing it on the Show menu, the
markup automatically appears each time the document is opened unless you
clear the ‘Make hidden markup visible when opening or saving’ check box
on the Security tab of the Options dialog box (Tools menu). Even if you
clear this check box, the markup is still in the document and can be
revealed by selecting the type of markup on the Show menu.”

Unfortunately, this solution does not appear to work. Before saving and
closing the document, I used the Reviewing toolbar to set the view to
“Final” and used the Show menu of the Reviewing toolbar to make sure
that Comments, Ink Annotations, Insertions and Deletions, and Formatting
were all turned off. I then checked the main View menu to make sure that
Markup was turned off. Then, after checking all of these spots, I went
to Tools | Options | Security and unchecked “Make hidden markup visible
when opening or saving”, as per the instructions in the Help article.

However, when I save, close, and re-open the document, the view still
reverts to “Final Showing Markup” and all the markup is still visible.

Suggestions?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Since you can't guarantee the settings on recipients' computers, if you want
to distribute this document without markup showing, you need to remove the
markup. You can do this on a copy of the document if you need to keep the
markup. In the copy, turn Track Changes off, accept all the change, and
delete all the comments, then save.

 

[Askme]

Hey Bonehead,

On the track changes toolbar we have the fourth icon as a note with a tick
mark. Drop down it.select accept all thechanges in document save it as a
different file. close the document and re-open it. Hope this helps!!!

update me on my e-mail

Thanks,
Ravi Kanth.N
(e-mail address removed)

 

[bonehead]

Since you can't guarantee the settings on recipients' computers, if you want
to distribute this document without markup showing, you need to remove the
markup. You can do this on a copy of the document if you need to keep the
markup. In the copy, turn Track Changes off, accept all the change, and
delete all the comments, then save.

Thanks for the reply. Somehow I had a feeling this would be the case.
But I still don't get why the Help instructions I referred to in my
original post didn't work as described. Ideas?

 

[Beth Melton]

Chances are you didn't modify the document in order to invoke an
actual Save. If you opened the document and only modified the Show
setting and then clicked the Save command then the changes you made
weren't actually saved. You need to make some type of edit in the
document in order to trigger a save - changing the view isn't enough.

Note these settings are for *your* computer only. By default the
Security setting is turned on so if you send the document to someone
else they will be able to see the tracked changes.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[bonehead]

Chances are you didn't modify the document in order to invoke an
actual Save. If you opened the document and only modified the Show
setting and then clicked the Save command then the changes you made
weren't actually saved. You need to make some type of edit in the
document in order to trigger a save - changing the view isn't enough.

Note these settings are for *your* computer only. By default the
Security setting is turned on so if you send the document to someone
else they will be able to see the tracked changes.

Ahh, makes sense. I'll forward this to my users.