Track Changes – formatting changes ( ’03 SP2)

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As others have noted, getting Word to accept tagged format changes can be problematic. This is especially true if you want to accept a format change in an inserted table, while leaving the insertion of the table itself marked as a change. It’s also hard to get Word to accept format changes inside inserted text boxes and frames. I’ll live with those problems.

BUT

I wish I could either globally accept ONLY the formatting changes in a document, or tinker with Track Changes such that the formatting changes are not marked in the first place. I want to do this because a client has specified that we have to submit a fully annotated version of our document with all content revisions marked with Track Changes. They don’t care about formatting changes – only content ones. Having the formatting changes appear can swamp the more substantive edits on a page. To complicate life, I am supposed to use Comments balloons to annotate why sections have changed.

I’ve already tried messing with the Tools Options Track Changes dialog box. Selecting “(none)” for the Formatting change option doesn’t prevent formatting change notations from being made. However, I can set them to a different color to make them easier to spy out and manually kill, but that’s labor intensive. I also can’t kill all balloons including the format change ones because I need to use them to annotate my substantive changes.

So. Aside from shooting the client, does anyone have any ideas on how to either prevent formatting tags from being created, or to accept them in one fell swoop?

ksalazar, proposal drone

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Teach the user to turn off Track Changes temporarily when applying formatting changes?

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The formatting balloons annoy me, too. You can get rid of them manually by clicking the down arrow next to Show on the Reviewing toolbar. In the show dropdown, clear the Comments, Ink Annotations, and Insertions & Deletions checkboxes, leaving Formatting still checked. Only formatting changes should show up in the document. Now you can accept all changes shown. Go back and check the boxes for the things you want to see.

It’s tedious to do and time consuming because of Word’s unfortunate behavior of dropping out of the Show dropdown with each mouse click. I found myself clearing the formatting balloons often (every hour or whenever to doc got too cluttered), so I recently recorded a macro to do the job. It has worked fine for me this past month. I put the macro on my toolbar and have been happily clicking the formatting balloons away.

I was going to send the macro in this post but stopped to look at the code. I see now that it could be dangerous. It appears that the ShowComments, etc., commands (e.g., WordBasic.ShowComments) are just toggles, because in my macro they appear before and after the AcceptAllChangesShown command. That means that, if for some reason you’ve, say, cleared the Comments checkbox, the macro would check it and then delete comments along with the formatting. At least that’s how it looks. Testing the state of the checkbox is way beyond my skills, so I may just remove the macro from the tool bar.

Nonetheless, the manual method works.

Pam

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This works in a very simple test document, but I’m not sure how well it will handle “real life” documents:

Sub AcceptFormattingRevisions()
If MsgBox("Accept all formatting revisions in the document?", _
vbQuestion + vbYesNo) = vbNo Then Exit Sub
Dim intCounter As Integer
With ActiveDocument.Revisions
For intCounter = .Count To 1 Step -1
Select Case .Item(intCounter).Type
Case wdNoRevision, wdRevisionInsert, wdRevisionDelete
' Do nothing with these
Case wdRevisionProperty, wdRevisionParagraphProperty, _
wdRevisionParagraphNumber, wdRevisionStyle, _
wdRevisionStyleDefinition, wdRevisionDisplayField, _
wdRevisionSectionProperty, wdRevisionTableProperty
' Accept these
.Item(intCounter).Accept
Case Else
' Debug only:
.Item(intCounter).Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdRed
Debug.Print "Encountered revision type " & _
.Item(intCounter).Type & _
"at " & CStr(intCounter)
End Select
Next
End With
End Sub

Note that some of the named constants may only exist in Word 2002 and higher, or whenever table styles were introduced.

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Thanks, both to you and Pam (comment above). I’ll test out this code and try her methods, too. Between the two of you my life should now be less cluttered.

kbsalazar, proposal drone

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I want to thank you, too. I’ll be trying out your macro this week.

I want to point out though that my example of what you could lose using my macro is mistaken. Comments are deleted, not accepted. But one could lose insertions and deletions with my poor macro because of the toggle characteristic. I’ll feel a lot safer once I have yours installed and running.

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