Problems with Track Changes

[Rob]

The problem we are seeing is that a document that has had changes made
to it and sent via email suddenly decides that it doesn't know who made
the change and reports unknown author. This can even happen in the
middle of a paragraph that has just been typed. We have seen this
problem in vX and 2004.

Anyone else seen this problem?

 

[Clive Huggan]

Only people who use Track Changes! That's right, it can forget who
made the changes. It also can change everybody's colors, sometimes in
the middle of editing the document. But my favorite is when it starts
attributing changes to people who never saw the document. Once I got a
document back from an editor with changes attributed to everyone she had
ever collaborated with on any document (a lot of people). You can try
the usual suspects (throw away all your prefs or whatever) but the fact
is that this is a buggy feature. My only advice is (1) live with it and
(2) try to keep things simple: don't preserve changes for several
exchanges, but rather always accept/reject all changes as soon as the
document changes hands. m.

I support Matt's comments.

Additionally, the way I keep documents free from corruption from Tracked
Changes is to turn the feature off while working, then do a Save As, and on
the "saved as" document choose Tools menu -> Compare Documents. This
produces the same end result as for tracking changes, but not on the master
copy of the document.

But irrespective of the method, accept/reject all as soon as the doc changes
hands is a must.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 7 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
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