Office 2003 re Track Changes

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Edited by HansV to provide link to mskb article

I did not find any other posts related to my question and found one Microsoft Article (Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 831771) which was of some help.
This is actually a question about Outlook but I guess it’s more Word related since it involves Track Changes. In Word Track Changes is set to show Final, no markups. A paragraph is copied and pasted into Outlook 2003 (HTML format). The text pastes is displaying track changes. Unable to find any setting in Outlook – other than change the method of pasting or change to unformatted text under. On the Tools menu, Options, Security: I made sure I had the following checked off: “Warn before printing, saving or sendng a file that contains tracked changes or comments and Start Word 2003 and cleared the Make hidden markup visible when opening or saving check box.

Has anyone encountered a similar experience while with pasting Word to Outlook? Thanks in advance for any input.

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Do you use Word as e-mail editor in Outlook?

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No we don’t. I should certainly have included that information. Thanks Hans.

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I tested this with Office 2003, and it only pastes the final text. I tried with mail formatted as HTML, Rich Text and Plain Text but that made no difference.

StuartR

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Thanks Stuart and Hans. I did some further testing and found that if I copied and pasted from a document created by myself where track changes had been utilized, it pastes perfectly fine with no track changes. When I copy and paste from someone else’s [Word 2000] document where track changes had been used at some point, and the pasted copy shows all of the tracked changes in the email.

I tried this at home where I use Outlook 2003 – standard version – and HTML formatting. When I pasted the same text from the same document NO track changes appeared in the pasted text. Very puzzling.

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I’ve tried this with a document that had tracked changes from two authors (me and someone else). I copied and pasted some text with tracked changes into an Outlook message, and only the final text was pasted, as if all revisions by both authors had been accepted.

I don’t know of any setting in Word or in Outlook that would make the tracked changes visible in an e-mail. Sorry.

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I think I might have figured it out. Word 2003 implements a new option, that is, “make hidden markup visible when opening or saving”: this is turned on by default. The only way we will be able to paste from a document with track changes enabled would be to to accept or reject all changes. I’m thinking that If we need to see a copy of all markups we should keep a separate copy which will show all changes tracked in that document. The document to be shared with others would be the one where all changes have been accepted – in other words, a ‘clean’ copy.

The thing that still puzzles me is that you, Hans, can paste the text from a document where track changes are enabled into an email message and none of the markup is pasted in – in other words the final text is pasted, “as if all revisions by both authors had been accepted”:. So I’m still going to dig a bit more on this …

Thanks again for your input.

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I always have that option set, and it did not cause the symptoms you describe for me.

I wonder if you might just have a corrupt document, does it happen with any document you get from other people?

StuartR

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I’m using Office XP at the moment and I cannot reproduce the problem. I always get the final version without markup when I paste into Outlook regardless of the display setting in Word while copying. Perhaps someone with Office 2003 can comment.

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