Hello Roger,
I haven't a clue about how to fix the problem, unfortunately, but since you
asked for one: I have a work-around. (Actually, for me it isn't inherently
an individual work-around as such: it's one of many practices that I and
other document development professionals follow with Word to minimize the
chances of Word taking out retribution on us.
I personally don't like to use tracked changes, for a multitude of reasons.*
When I get a document from someone else I Accept All immediately, to remove
any traces, then I make my changes without tracking.
After I've finished, I choose Tools menu => Track Changes => Compare
Documents and look at the changes from there (or send both the tracked and
untracked versions of the document to others), but keeping the main version
free of tracking.
This method, which I get my colleagues to follow too, always ensures "rats'
nests" are avoided, because the main document we work on is kept pristine
(as far as *any* Word document can be)...
* You really want to know what the reasons are?: It can wreak havoc with
automatic numbering (which includes automatic bulleting). It can interfere
with deleting footnotes. Tables especially can become corrupted. When tables
have been modified with a change in font size and "Accept Change" or "Accept
All Changes" has been nominated, these changes are not accepted and stay
visible in the document when viewed as Final Showing Markup ‹ you have to
"select all" in the tables (and text boxes, etc) to have them approved.
There are more potential problems in relation to merged documents. And there
can be problems associated with paragraph marks. At the lower end of the
inconvenience scale, you will often find spaces removed or unwanted spaces
added.
The reasons: To quote John McGhie: "A Word document internally is an
indescribably complex rat's nest of binary pointers. Each tracked change
sets a heap of extra pointers, to the beginning and end of the deleted text,
and the beginning and end of the new text. If those pointers occur within
pointers ... what you end up with is a document that is so complex that Word
can't unravel it. It's a limitation of the Word document format, which was
designed for simpler times when computers were smaller and slower, and so
were documents."
Cheers,
Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
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