Selective Tracking in Track Changes? (2003 SP1)

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After years of integrating napkin-scrawled edits, I’m happy to have landed in a shop where everyone uses Track Changes within Word. But I have one question/wish-list item for that feature (or for a future edition of Word Hacks).

Is it possible to tinker Word so that Track Changes does NOT track formatting changes? The text changes are all substantive, but the team as a whole really doesn’t care about minor font and spacing nonsense. The TC tags for those updates are just clutter to them. It’s a pain to go through and accepting JUST the formatting changes to clear them out while preserving all of the other changes the team has made.

Hints, tips, swift kicks all graciously accepted,

K. Salazar, proposal drone

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You could write a Macro that would accept revisions for you, based on Revision.Type. Something like (untested…)

For each revLoop in ActiveDocument.Revisions
Select Case revLoop.Type
Case wdRevisionParagraphProperty, wdRevisionSectionProperty, wdRevisionStyle
revLoop.Accept
Case Else
End Select
Next revLoop

If you need to include headers, footers, text boxes etc, then you will need to do an outer loop going through all the StoryTypes in the document, if you want to do this and you don’t know how then ask us for an example.

The valid types of revision are

wdNoRevision
wdRevisionDelete
wdRevisionInsert
wdRevisionParagraphProperty
wdRevisionReconcile
wdRevisionSectionProperty
wdRevisionStyleDefinition
wdRevisionConflict
wdRevisionDisplayField
wdRevisionParagraphNumber
wdRevisionProperty
wdRevisionReplace
wdRevisionStyle
wdRevisionTableProperty


So you would just have to decide which of these you wanted to automatically accept.

StuartR

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Perfect! Thanks! I’ll try it out.

-K.

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I happen to agree…I’n not a fan of automatically showing formatting. You may already know this, but you can switch track formatting off in each document by going to “Show” on the Reviewing toolbar and unchecking Format. That’s my quick fix for each document I do.

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