Hello Eric,
If you want to use Track Changes and virtually eliminate corruption of your
documents, you'll need to "Accept All", or otherwise resolve *all* of them,
preferably in each cycle. It's particularly unwise to allow more than one
layer of Tracked Changes to exist in a document.
Here are two very relevant comments by John McGhie:
"A Word document internally is an indescribably complex rat¹s 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 pointersŠ what you end up with is a
document that is so complex that Word can¹t unravel it. It¹s a limitation of
the Word document format, which was designed for simpler times when
computers were smaller and slower, and so were documents."
³Intrinsically, Tracked Changes results in extremely complex structures in
the document, so you need to edit carefully with paragraph marks shown. If
you do not, you can end up corrupting the document. It is never a good idea
to make changes within changes: if you do too much of this, document
corruption becomes very likely.²
My documents constantly go back and forth to other users, almost always on
PCs. I never have corruption problems (hmm, once maybe 5 years ago), albeit
as a result of fairly high discipline and taking some time to brief my
colleagues on why I have adopted these practices. I usually keep the
document I work on totally free of tracked changing, by comparing new
versions via Tools menu => Track changes => Compare Documents. This creates
a separate new document that is the same as if I had Track Changes on in the
main document. I then have several strategies for incorporating the changes,
but the detail is a bit long for here: if you are interested, read pages
65-69 of some notes on the way I use Word for the Mac, titled "Bend Word to
Your Will", which are available as a free download from the Word MVPs'
website (
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Bend/BendWordToYourWill.html).
[Note: "Bend Word to your will" is designed to be used electronically and
most subjects are self-contained dictionary-style entries. If you decide to
read more widely than the item I've referred to, it's important to read the
front end of the document -- especially pages 3 and 5 -- so you can select
some Word settings that will allow you to use the document effectively.]
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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