word 2007 and combining edits from different users...

[Franz12]

Hi! We have frequently the situation that we have a manuscript that needs to
be edited by several different persons (simulataneously). The first problem
is that - at least to my knowledge - even the new word 2007 is not able to
have multiple persons working on the same manuskript as e.g. Onenote can.
therefore, our people need to open the work manuscript as a read only
document and save it under another name. Then, the mess up begins: word 2007
seems to be able to combine the edits of 2 persons, but what about more than
2 persons. Do I have to really pay for the precious time of my people to
manually put togehter one by one costing much of time???
Furthermore, even then, we are not out of the mess. Thats because word has
the behaviour to hightlight even all completely unimportant and unneccary
things as wanted changes of the editors such as language changes, format
changes and so on, where never a editor picked on, but they were
automatically generated just by opening these manuscripts on different
computers. And in an international company, it is clearly not avoidable that
the people NEEDS to use different international versions of word and windows.
So, if somebody of Microsoft is listening and willing to answer: what to do
to keep on trying ms word instead of moving over to other products which
incoroporates such an automatic version tracking? Is it for example possible
to filter the highlighted edits in the proof and limit them to those, which
are interesting such as changes in the text, but to exclude those silly
language changes and so on? It sounds not so important, but having e.g. the
edits of 10 people in the manuscript and changes were tracked highlighted,
you are going crazy if you are at the end not able to see the important
changes because they are kind of hided by those silly ones like language or
grammar changes....
Any ideas? May a commercially available add-on to get out of this situation?
I cannot imagine that MS is not aware of this situation , because all people
I know that use this product in a commercial environmnet, where normally many
people have to work on those manuscript have the same problem and are REALLY
looking for alternatives! Thanks! F

 

[Pat Garard]

G'Day Franz,

Can you define a Set of Rules that Word (or anybody else) can use to
differentiate between

... ... ... by those silly ones like language or
grammar changes.... and
... ... ... the important
changes because they are kind of hided ... ... ...

so that a filter may be designed?

If you can, you will become very rich!

Do you set Standards and Procedures in your organisation?

The Content Change Procedure might specifically prohibit 'silly' changes,
and permit Tracking of Important changes made by Content Editors.

The Spelling and Grammar Standards might be the responsibility of a final
Standards Editor who makes un-Tracked changes only to style, spelling
and grammar.

If you require multi-user Edit Access to documents, then have multiple
copies of the document and merge the changes at the end - however
it really does not work very well unless there are STRICT Standards
and Procedures.

The following links (especially the first) may be helpful:
http://www.nextpage.com/support/doc/15/r8/merge.htm
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=647
http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/word/HA010770991033.aspx

Can you identify a word processor that meets your requirements - we
would all love a copy!

 

[Franz12]

ok, I know that this is not an easy issue. But one good filter to start would
be to consider during the comparison process only text changes, but e.g. no
format changes. Or even better, to adopt them, but not to highlight them....
We found another strange behaviour in this issue of word 2007. We had two
versions of a document containing graphics (bar graphs) from Excel 2007. We
just changes two or three sentences in this document to test the comparing
procedure. At the end, Word highlights correctly the changes in text, but all
the excel graphics pop up as changed and newly inserted by each user. Not
useable this way, we have to incorporate many graphics in our manuscripts....
Any idea about this?

Furthermore, I'v read the MS advertising that windows sharepoint services V3
will have the possibility that you open a local copy of a word file from a
wss3 document library, work on it, and sync it back to the wss3 server, even
if multiple users worked on this file. Does anyone has experience with this
feature, does it really works if more than one user did some edits?

Thanks! Franz

 

[Beth Melton]

On the Reviewing tab, under Compare, click the Combine command. What
you do is combine the first set of edits, then on the combined
document, use the Combine command again and combine the next set, and
so on.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Beth Melton]

Oh, and I forgot to add, in the Combine dialog box, click the More
button so you can exclude mark-up.

Additionally, also on the Reviewing tab, in the Tracking group, The
Show Markup command will allow to turn off changes such as formatting
or turn off the display of revisions for specific authors.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/