Reviewing toolbar

[Jacques]

Is there any logic in the way Word 2004 shows the reviewing toolbar when
you turn Track Changes on? Just because I want to record the changes I'm
making doesn't mean I want to review the changes that are there. Can
Word be prevented from doing this? Does it require a macro?

(To add insult to injury, if you remove the toolbar manually Word does
not restore the document window to its original size.)

 

[Elliott Roper]

Is there any logic in the way Word 2004 shows the reviewing toolbar when
you turn Track Changes on? Just because I want to record the changes I'm
making doesn't mean I want to review the changes that are there. Can
Word be prevented from doing this? Does it require a macro?

Don't know about a macro. It looks like it would be more trouble than
it is worth. It is but

(To add insult to injury, if you remove the toolbar manually Word does
not restore the document window to its original size.)

You might try undocking the pesky toolbar from the top of the screen.
Since you are going to disappear the little pest as soon as you turn on
track changes, if you leave it parked in the middle of the screen,
stupid Word makes no attempt to resize your window before you get a
chance to dismiss it.

I assigned keyboard shortcuts to all the useful items in the track
changes toolbar. It is quite zippy using them to review all ones edits,
even when you don't start off with that in mind.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Jacques,

Is there any logic in the way Word 2004 shows the reviewing toolbar when
you turn Track Changes on? Just because I want to record the changes I'm
making doesn't mean I want to review the changes that are there.

Hmm, now that you mention it, that is annoying. Though I use the New
Comment button and have added some "highlight pink" "highlight green"
buttons to mine, so I guess it never annoyed me.

(To add insult to injury, if you remove the toolbar manually Word does
not restore the document window to its original size.)

Super-annoying! (but your ResizeWindow macro is handy, no?

Can
Word be prevented from doing this? Does it require a macro?

I'd go with a macro, myself. There's no preference for it. Macros are all
about keeping Word from driving me crazy.

You can tweak the macro here to stop it from ever coming up, I think, but
slightly more trouble to recall it (haven't tried this myself)
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MacrosVBA/BanishWebToolbar.htm
(hit reload a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)

I started but never perfected a "GradingUI" macro that did all sorts of
things, changed the view and percentage zoom, brought up my custom comments
toolbar, just for an example (below). Obviously you could record or write a
macro that turns on Track Changes and sets the Reviewing toolbar to "false"
and does whatever other UI changes you want.

Example macro:

Sub gradingUI()
'
'
CommandBars("Reviewing").Visible = True
CommandBars("Grading").Visible = True
With ActiveWindow
.Width = 1230
.Height = 776
..View.Type = wdPageView
..View.Zoom.Percentage = 130
End With
End Sub

 

[Jacques]

Hi Jacques,



Hmm, now that you mention it, that is annoying. Though I use the New
Comment button and have added some "highlight pink" "highlight green"
buttons to mine, so I guess it never annoyed me.


Super-annoying! (but your ResizeWindow macro is handy, no?
Indeed!


I'd go with a macro, myself. There's no preference for it. Macros are all
about keeping Word from driving me crazy.

A macro it is. I often turn Track Changes on and off -- partly so that
only important changes are recorded, and partly so that I never record
the insertion or deletion of a paragraph mark -- and this damn toolbar
will certainly drive me crazy if I don't stamp on it.

You can tweak the macro here to stop it from ever coming up, I think, but
slightly more trouble to recall it (haven't tried this myself)
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MacrosVBA/BanishWebToolbar.htm
(hit reload a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)

I started but never perfected a "GradingUI" macro that did all sorts of
things, changed the view and percentage zoom, brought up my custom comments
toolbar, just for an example (below). Obviously you could record or write a
macro that turns on Track Changes and sets the Reviewing toolbar to "false"
and does whatever other UI changes you want.

Example macro:

Sub gradingUI()
'
'
CommandBars("Reviewing").Visible = True
CommandBars("Grading").Visible = True
With ActiveWindow
.Width = 1230
.Height = 776
.View.Type = wdPageView
.View.Zoom.Percentage = 130
End With
End Sub

Thanks, I'll try something like this. Perhaps Word will momentarily show
the toolbar and then give me the satisfaction of seeing it disappear
again? We shall see.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Hi Jacques:

Yes, it does require a macro. Here it is:

<snip Gaaack!!>
further to my earlier post...
I remembered a low-tech way of switching track changes off and back on
without being pestered by the toolbar.
1. Shove the toolbar *almost* off the screen. That way you don't care
about dismissing it. It always comes back, but with but a single pixel
peeping shyly from a margin, it can be safely ignored.
2. Assign a keyboard shortcut to toggle track changes.
3. Assign keyboard shortcuts to the few useful things on the toolbar,
like next and previous change and accept/reject, and something to start
a comment.
I have largely given up on track changes while typing. Compare
documents is much less stressful. Track changes is cool for
editing/reviewing someone else's work though.

 

[Jacques]

Magic. Thanks John!

Hi Jacques:

Yes, it does require a macro. Here it is:

Sub ReviewingHide()

Dim tb As CommandBar

Set tb = Application.CommandBars("Reviewing")

With tb
.Visible = False
.Enabled = False
End With

End Sub

Note the order: if you Set Enabled false before you set Visible false,
you'll crash it.

Once you Disable a toolbar, it vanishes entirely: you can't get it back at
all when you want it. It disappears from the User Interface You need
another macro...

Sub ReviewingReveal()

Dim tb As CommandBar

Set tb = Application.CommandBars("Reviewing")

With tb
.Enabled = True
.Visible = True
.RowIndex = 9 ' Docking order
.Top = 300
.Left = 300
End With

End Sub


Cheers

 

[Jacques]

Hi Jacques:

Yes, it does require a macro. Here it is:

<snip Gaaack!!>
further to my earlier post...
I remembered a low-tech way of switching track changes off and back on
without being pestered by the toolbar.
1. Shove the toolbar *almost* off the screen. That way you don't care
about dismissing it. It always comes back, but with but a single pixel
peeping shyly from a margin, it can be safely ignored.

Thanks Elliott, I'd use that if John hadn't just given me a macro that
disables the toolbar altogether.

2. Assign a keyboard shortcut to toggle track changes.

There already is one -- Cmd-Shift-E.

3. Assign keyboard shortcuts to the few useful things on the toolbar,
like next and previous change and accept/reject, and something to start
a comment.
I have largely given up on track changes while typing. Compare
documents is much less stressful. Track changes is cool for
editing/reviewing someone else's work though.

Come to think of it, I don't really need Track Changes for what I'm
writing at the moment. All I need is to show my co-author which passages
of my draft were not in the previous version. I could just create a
character style for such passages, define it as (say) blue for my own
purposes while working on screen and change it to underline for the
benefit of my co-author (who will be working from a black and white
printout). Why didn't I think of that before?

regards

 

[Jacques]

Come to think of it, I don't really need Track Changes for what I'm
writing at the moment. All I need is to show my co-author which passages
of my draft were not in the previous version. I could just create a
character style for such passages, define it as (say) blue for my own
purposes while working on screen and change it to underline for the
benefit of my co-author (who will be working from a black and white
printout). Why didn't I think of that before?

.... which brings me to my next question. Is there an easy way to apply a
character style to all text which is currently marked by Track Changes
as inserted text, so that it will retain the formatting of that style
even when the changes are accepted? Or does this need another macro?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Come to think of it, I don't really need Track Changes for what I'm
writing at the moment. All I need is to show my co-author which passages
of my draft were not in the previous version. I could just create a
character style for such passages, define it as (say) blue for my own
purposes while working on screen and change it to underline for the
benefit of my co-author (who will be working from a black and white
printout). Why didn't I think of that before?

You could do. Over several versions, that could produce a really
interesting way of looking at the history of the doc. Slightly annoying in
that you would have to apply/turn on the character style every time you
started typing new text.

Another possibility, which Elliott mentioned but didn't explain, would be
Tools | Compare Documents. This would mark the differences between the two
versions automatically and retroactively, rather than as you work.
(Advantage of forcing you to do a Save As rather than edit in the active
version, redundancy is good).

 

[Jacques]

You could do. Over several versions, that could produce a really
interesting way of looking at the history of the doc. Slightly annoying in
that you would have to apply/turn on the character style every time you
started typing new text.

Less annoying than having to turn Track Changes off every time I insert
or delete a paragraph mark, so that it doesn't mess up the numbering.
Besides ...

Another possibility, which Elliott mentioned but didn't explain, would be
Tools | Compare Documents. This would mark the differences between the two
versions automatically and retroactively, rather than as you work.
(Advantage of forcing you to do a Save As rather than edit in the active
version, redundancy is good).

.... I don't use Track Changes to record *all* the changes I'm making,
just the ones I think my co-author will wish to see. For example, I
don't use it for deletions at all, only additions. I doubt that Word is
intelligent enough to draw the distinction (though it probably thinks it
is).

 

[Elliott Roper]

... which brings me to my next question. Is there an easy way to apply a
character style to all text which is currently marked by Track Changes
as inserted text, so that it will retain the formatting of that style
even when the changes are accepted? Or does this need another macro?

Aha! Now I see where you are heading with this.

There is a very simple way to get the message to your co-author that
avoids track changes completely. And macros too.

Simply make the changes in some character style that signals them to
the other person in much the way that it looks as a tracked change.

You or your co-author can accept the selected changes with ctrl-space,
which will remove the character style and revert to the underlying
paragraph style. You can snap into your character style with a
keystroke or two. One keystroke might require a macro. I'd use
cmd-shift-s, then a 1 letter abbreviation for my style, then ret. It is
long winded to write out the recipe, but quick in practice, and easier
to remember.

One downside to this is you can't have two character styles on the same
text, so that blows away emphasis style on anything you want to
highlight. ctrl-space also knocks off hand applied bold and italic, so
you'd have to carefully select what changes you accept if you had that
stuff lying about.

I get cold shivers when contemplating a macro to operate on tracked
change text. It's like trying fire-eating while riding a unicycle down
a steep hill.

 

[Jacques]

Thanks Elliott. I just wish I'd thought of this sooner. It will take
forever to apply a character style to all my inserted text if I have to
do it manually.

 

[John McGhie [MVP -- Word and Word Mac]]

Hi Jacque:

Don't do these things the hard way

1) Turn off Track Changes

2) Accept all changes in the document

3) Finish the document

4) Use Compare Documents to compare the finished document with the previous
version. Every difference will be marked as a tracked change. No toolbars.
No corruptions. No funny styles that then have to be laboriously removed
later

Cheers

 

[Jacques]

John, I was a bit sceptical about the Compare Documents feature at
first. But I've just tried it on a chapter which has been fairly heavily
revised, and it works surprisingly well. The result is a mess, of
course, but it wouldn't be all that hard to clean it up so that it's
readable.

The most irritating aspect is that Word has marked every word that has
an apostrophe in it, even if the word hasn't changed. Presumably it has
detected the difference between a straight apostrophe and a curly one!

Thanks yet again.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Less annoying than having to turn Track Changes off every time I insert
or delete a paragraph mark, so that it doesn't mess up the numbering.
Besides ...

You may know this already, but Track Changes does not permanently mess up
the numbering. Once all the changes have been accepted or rejected, the
numbers should sort themselves out. However, dealing with that flexibility
may not be acceptable to your co-author or workflow--in which case, I guess
you are stuck with on/off TC. Except you are moving away from Track Changes
anyhow. So just FYI.

Daiya

 

[Jacques]

You may know this already, but Track Changes does not permanently mess up
the numbering. Once all the changes have been accepted or rejected, the
numbers should sort themselves out. However, dealing with that flexibility
may not be acceptable to your co-author or workflow--in which case, I guess
you are stuck with on/off TC. Except you are moving away from Track Changes
anyhow. So just FYI.

Thanks Daiya, I didn't know that in fact, and it's well worth knowing
for the future. But, when producing a draft for someone who is not all
that computer-literate, the mess that Track Changes makes of automatic
paragraph numbering is to be avoided at all costs.

 

[John McGhie [MVP -- Word and Word Mac]]

Hi Jacques:

Remain sceptical Compare Documents is not yet perfect. It was greatly
improved in Word 2004, but it will run into trouble in large tables.

For documents that do not include large tables, it works very well.

Sadly, yes, a straight quote replaced with a curly quote will count as a
change

Cheers

--

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Business Analyst, Consultant Technical Writer
Microsoft MVP (Word, Word for Mac)
Sydney, Australia +61 (0)4 1209 1410