Merging documents skips tracked deletions

[Mark Tangard]

Fairly new to Compare-and-Merge, but thought I was following the
instructions carefully....

Whenever I merge (comments & revisions), most if not all of the tracked
deletions are ignored, that is, they appear untouched in the merged
document. This happens whether I merge to the original or to a new
document, and it happens on 2 different PCs running Word 2003 and 2007.
Is there a setting I'm missing?

TIA
MT

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

The other day I did a Compare (2007) and noticed a checkbox in that
big panel of options asking whether to do something-or-other with
tracked changes (I think it said "treat tracked changes as
incorporated," or something like that -- probably not using that
word!). Try it with the opposite setting for that box?

 

[Mark Tangard]

Thanks, Peter. I've seen that message, but this is a Merge, not a
Compare, and the options are different.

But I just figured something out: What I want is a Merge, or at least
that's what the documentation implies I want -- a resulting document
that combines the comments and tracked revisions from another
document(s). I CAN get that, if I do a Compare instead -- it shows both
insertions & deletions properly and imports the comments. Only problem
-- big problem, really -- is that it removes the true author identifier
from those revisions & comments, replacing it with my own. I can alter
that in the dialog by specifying one name to, er, 'blame' for all of the
imported comments/revisions, but that doesn't work if the doc has been
fondled by several commenters, which is the norm here.

Does anyone know a way to do a true merge, with the author identifiers
preserved? A regular Merge seems to do that perfectly except that it
ignores deletions!

TIA
MT