John said:
Hi Steve:
Tracked Changes uses the "Logged in User ID" to recognise the
user. However, they add a tag to that to identify the
computer, and another to identify the "editing session" in
which the change was made.
Without the tags, many of the extended functions available
through SharePoint would not work or be unreliable.
You can handle this two ways:
1) Either use Remote Desktop to always work on only one
machine;
2) Or use VBA to make the User Name the same on both machines
(since Word 2008 doesn't have any VBA, you will have to do
this in Word 2007).
Clive's suggestion is by FAR the simplest and most reliable
Make a copy of the document, hack and chop to your
heart's content without any change tracking, then use Compare
Documents to add all the changes in in a single operation when
you have finished.
Although I've not done a lot of Compares in Mac Office, I have
done many of them in Windows XP with Word. Although I understand
the risks that John and Clive are referring to with Track
Changes, my experience with the "compare documents" function has
not been encouraging if you need absolutely correct information.
When using compare, I have experienced the following:
1) We use a LOT of tables for required performance data on
products that are being subcontracted. Tables can really choke
Compares. Frequently I have found that Word handles this by
simply marking the entire table as deleted and then inserting a
totally new table which can leave you playing "Where's Waldo" on
the single word change that you made in a single cell.
2) Compare is not 100% reliable. I frequently see underscores on
items that have actually been deleted and vice-versa.
3) Compare is not always consistent. When comparing document A to
document B, the set of changes that it shows is not always the
same as when comparing document B to document A. Some changes
will be missing from one view and others missing from the other.
As a result I am forced to do BOTH compares to try and minimize
the chances of missing a change.
4) The way Compare searchs in order to sync the two docs being
compared sometimes results in change markups that are much more
difficult to read. Track changes allow you to control the
presentation of the markup. In altering requirement documents,
sometimes you want to show how the functional essence of a series
of requirements has been changed (e.g., 2 requirements being
shown as 3 very similar requirements where conceptually you have
deleted 2 and replaced them with 3). With Compare you just get a
scambling of text alterations that more closely reflect the
parsing algorithm of the Compare function.
Again, because of my applications for Word, the caveat is that I
almost never deal with compares or track changes when using Mac
Office, but I use them significantly with Windows XP and
(currently) Word 2003.
My only solution, unfortunately, is using a string of cascaded
backups for the track changed document(s) in question
