Customizing Revision Mark (change bar) location (Word 97 SR2)

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I have a Word 97 document that was created using IMI (Infomap) and many of the table borders are situated outside the right margin. Consequently when I track changes, the revision marks (change bars) appear slightly within the table, making it confusing for reviewers to distinguish between the edges of the table and the revision marks. Without resorting to keeping all revision marks on the left side, or dragging all of the rightmost table borders to the left, is there a way I can control exactly where the revision marks appear on the page? I need them to be about half an inch closer to the right edge of the paper.

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George,

There doesn’t seem to be any way in Word to customize the offset of the change bars in relation to the margins.

For working with regular text paragraphs i.e. not in tables, there is a kind of tab called a bar tab, that you can use to simulate change bars – to get one of these, make sure the insertion point is in a regular paragraph and that the ruler is displaying. Click on the little square that’s the left of the ruler. If you click repeatedly on it, it will cycle through the available types of tabs that are available.

Click until you see the bar tab, which looks like a vertical line. Then click somewhere in the ruler (but within the paragraph margins) to insert the bar tab. Then with the mouse click on the bar tab and drag it to the left outside the left margin.

You should then see a bar that is indistinguishable from a change bar (probably Word uses bar tabs internally to produce track change bars), except you can adjust its location left/right by dragging in the ruler.

Tragically though, you cannot use a bar tab outside the margin of a table!
So this whole exercise is probably fruitless but at least it is interesting….

Gary

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Gary – can I check – are you sure you’re talking about W97 when you speak of ‘bar tabs’? Only I have just four choices – left, right, centre, decimal – when I cycle through the tab types available – no sign of a ‘bar tab’ anywhere!

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Beryl,

I’ve been on Word 2K for a year now so can’t recall for sure – but if it’s not available via the ruler button, it may be available in the Format > Tabs dialog – have a look in there….(?)….

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Yes, I can confirm as Wd97 user, that you CAN’T get the bar tab from the ruler, but you DO get at it from Format>Tabs…

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Yup, that’s where it is. You had me going for a moment there – I hadn’t come across that one before! What exactly does a bar tab do, though, pls?

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Hi,

There’ve been a couple of previous threads about these, but not a lot of detail regarding their uses, except perhaps here.

It looks like even the Word Help doesn’t mention these….

Gary

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Thanks, Gary, I’ll try it.
I’ve since discovered also that horizontal placement of the revision marks depends on the footer margins. By dragging the right footer margin to the right (using the ruler) I could get the revision marks to move to the right. Unfortunately, this document is so heavily under Infomap’s influence that this fix also forced some other elements to move undesirably, such as the “continued on next page” blurb .

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