Accept selected tracked changes (2003)

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I’m editing a 34-page document with Track Changes turned on. The first change I made was to replace the two spaces between sentences with one space. I made the change with the Find and Replace dialog. That change splashed the document with red (a couple hundred changes). Now I’ve got a mess

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If you still have the document open, you could undo the replacement, turn off Track Changes temporarily, perform the replacement, then turn on Track Changes again.

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Yes, but I’ve made a large number of changes since I changed the spacing between sentences. The document is open at this moment, but it’s been saved and opened/closed several times since I started work.

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I think you’ll have to go through the document and accept individual changes – sorry.

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In theory you could use a macro to examine all the Revisions in the document and, if any match a particular pattern, accept the change. But it might take longer to write and test the code than to do it manually.

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Try this on a copy. Note that I’m using Word 2003.

Go into Tools > Opt ions > User Information and change the user name & initials temporarily. Make a note of the original information. Back in the doc with the markup showing and track changes turned on, do a wildcard search for [space]{2,} and replace it with a [space]. — Word will find the already marked double spaces and the “new space” and replace them again, but this time as a change made by your temporary user. — #Click the Show dropdown arrow on the Reviewing tool bar and then move to the Reviewers subdropdown. Clear a box for any reviewer that is not your temporary user name. If there are many reviewer names, repeat from # until only your temporary name remains. (Does that remind you of knitting instructions?) The only changes showing should be your newly replaced spaces. Now accept all changes **shown**. The result should be one space and no markup. Now change your user information back to the original and turn on all the reviewers changes.

You could do this with regular search and replace (two spaces to one), but you’d have to run it twice, since the first iteration would leave you with two spaces again but without markup.

Good luck,
Pam

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How devilishly clever! Thanks for the response. I’ll try it tomorrow!

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