Track Changes Efficiency

[Michael_Tennes]

If my understanding is correct, the Track Changes feature in Word is very serial in nature:

Author -> Reviewer 1 -> Reviewer 2 -> Editor -> Author

It would seem to make more sense to allow Track Changes to operate in a parallel fashion so that suggestions, corrections, and comments could be simultaneously made by other users. Since the document submitted for review would be "protected" it would seem merging these changes in to a single document would be straightforward.

Does the Merge Document feature do that?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

What happens when one person edited a sentence, and someone else deleted
that same sentence and a third person moved that same sentence to a
different section? Which change takes effect? I agree with you that
this might be a nice feature, but it is not at all straightforward to
implement--and I guarantee you that since when Rev1, Rev2, and Rev3
conflict, sometimes you will you want to accept Rev1 and sometimes Rev3,
and since Word is essentially machine-like and not a person and
therefore not capable of judging good writing and forced to always use
the same logic to prioritize one change over another, you would probably
be consistently annoyed with the choices it made.

You can send a feature request (Help | Send Feedback)--for the reasons
above, I think it's unlikely that we will see this, but no harm in
getting your request into the database. WinWord *might* do something
like this (no clue, really), but I think in collaboration with some
Windows-only version management features.

You might investigate SubEthaEdit, which is designed for simultaneous
collaborative writing, as Word is not.
http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

I think your only workaround would be to receive back three sets of
reviews and merge them yourself. It's possible that the Tools | Track
Changes | Compare Documents feature may help. This would let you run
the first set of edits, accept the changes you want from Rev1, then
compare that document with Rev2--this will overlay the Rev2 changes onto
the document that has already incorporated the Rev1 changes. It will
still be slow, but may help reduce the extra typing.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Michael:

Yes, it does. You are looking for "Compare and Merge Documents".

You need to make sure that each user is logged on to their computer with a
different name (because that's the name that will be appended to each
change).

You also need to ensure that you have switched OFF "Remove personally
identifiable information on save" otherwise the details of who made each
change will be stripped.

And it's one or the other: Either the users use tracked changes, OR you use
"Compare Documents" when you get the changed files back. Compare and Merge
is not reliable if either Original or New document contains Tracked Changes.
So if they do, make a copy and resolve the changes before trying to Merge.

The Word 2008 help for this is not there yet: use this one:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HP030822041033.aspx?pid=CH06355108103
3

Hope this helps

If my understanding is correct, the Track Changes feature in Word is very
serial in nature:

Author -> Reviewer 1 -> Reviewer 2 -> Editor -> Author

It would seem to make more sense to allow Track Changes to operate in a
parallel fashion so that suggestions, corrections, and comments could be
simultaneously made by other users. Since the document submitted for review
would be "protected" it would seem merging these changes in to a single
document would be straightforward.

Does the Merge Document feature do that?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia