Track Changes & Hilite (2003 SP1)

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I’m not sure if this is easily doable but I thought I would ask anyway.

I have policy and procedure documents that undergo many changes prior to approval. I use track changes to let the management team see the changes they are approving. Now here’s the tricky part. The staff would like to see what has changed in a policy/procedure so they don’t have to read everything all over again to find where changes were made. I have been asked to hilite the words/sections that have been altered. But once I have “accepted all changes” in the document, I won’t know where to hilite. This would be no big deal if it was a one-off document, but we have over 700 policies that are constantly being revised.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how this could be accomplished?

TIA.
Deb

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Word can do a Compare after the fact between your clean old document and your clean new document, inserting the familiar revision marks to show insertions and deletions. In a complicated document, particularly one with multiple tables, this has never worked very well (it seemed to get worse from Word 97 to Word 2000). I don’t know whether it has been improved much in Word 2003. Definitely worth a try.

If Word’s Compare feature doesn’t give an accurate report, there are third party products that can do after-the-fact comparisons. Well regarded products include WorkShare’s DeltaView (info) and SoftInterface’s Diff Doc and WordDocDiff (info). Since they can be set to use direct formatting rather than revision marks, you might find these produce a more suitable report for your needs than Word.

If you do try these third party products, please post your review here for future reference. Thanks!

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Thanks for the suggestions. I know I tried the “compare” feature in WORD a few years ago and was disappointed with the results but possibly it works better in 2003. I’ll give it a whirl and see if anything has changed. I’ll post back with the results. Thanks also for the links to the software….that could be a possibility as well!

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Deb hi

I had a similar problem recently. If you are using TOC you can highlight the clause/chapter/subject heading (outline level) and this will show up in the TOC highlighted.

This was suggested to me by Andrew Lockton in post post 482840 .

Works just great

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Thanks for taking the time to reply Phil.

I wish I could do it that way but I actually send out a list to all staff that contains hyperlinks to the recently changed documents. We do in fact have a TOC and Index on our Intranet but we spoil the staff by giving them hyperlinks direct to the changed documents. I would venture a guess to say that the staff rarely, if ever, use the Intranet for checking out the P&P’s. They just use my email that contains the latest changes. So of course, when staff open up a linked document, they are wondering what changes have been made to that document. I understand their reason; sometimes it’s only title changes that have been made in a document and other times it’s major procedural changes. They (staff) are looking for an even easier way to quickly discern the difference between old and new. I’m still struggling a bit with this as I certainly could use Word’s hiliting feature but it would be quite time consuming on my part as I would have to have the old copy in front of me while hiliting the changes to the new copy on the screen. Ah well, possibly we are again spoiling them even more by considering this!

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This code will accept all changes, and highlight the new text wherever you have additions and replacements. What would you want to do for all the other change types (listed under Case Else)?

It would be easy to modify this so that all paragraphs in the range were highlighted, regardless of the change type. Would that be any better?

StuartR


Public Sub HiliteChanges()
Dim revRevision As Revision

For Each revRevision In ActiveDocument.Revisions
Select Case revRevision.Type
Case wdRevisionInsert, wdRevisionReplace
revRevision.Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdYellow

Case Else
'wdRevisionDelete
'wdNoRevision
'wdRevisionInsert
'wdRevisionParagraphProperty
'wdRevisionReconcile
'wdRevisionSectionProperty
'wdRevisionStyleDefinition
'wdRevisionConflict
'wdRevisionDisplayField
'wdRevisionParagraphNumber
'wdRevisionProperty
'wdRevisionStyle
'wdRevisionTableProperty
End Select
revRevision.Accept
Next revRevision
End Sub

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Stuart,
This macro of yours has all sorts of potential.
Instead being of highlighted, the text could be changed to Brown or Blue or even a character style (eg 2005 – Bold Blue, 2006 – Bold Brown, …).
If the author runs the macro on the revisions each time it goes back and forth to the reviewers, the changes for this issue of the document would accumulate in that year’s colour (style).
Later when staff open the document by hyperlinking to it from the intranet, they can easily see how recent the changes are.

BTW is there a better forum for discussing these document management issues rather than here on Word.
Regards,
Judith

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> BTW is there a better forum for discussing these document management issues rather than here on Word.

I think this is the most appropriate forum we have for this discussion.

StuartR

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Wow!!

Stuart, your code is exactly what our staff is looking for! I tested this on 3 different pending-approval documents and it is amazing! Many thanks.

May I ask how I make this code available in any Word document? I’m relatively new to macros. Thanks again!

Deb

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Please remember that this code will not highlite DELETED text, or draw attention to it in any way. This may well be an issue for your users.

If you want a Macro to be available to all documents then you can either put it in your Normal Template, or you can create a global template to store it in (a global template is simply a template that you copy to the folder indicated in Tools > Options > File Locations > Startup).

If you need more help then please post again and I’ll provide a bit more detail.

StuartR

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The dusty old macro in post 173394 shows a more traditional presentation of underlined additions and strikethrough deletions. As mentioned there, I find that I have to keep re-running it to catch all the changes, so it might make sense to add another loop around it, such as:

While ActiveDocument.Revisions.Count > 0
‘ For Each loop goes inside here
Wend

Note that I haven’t tested that!!

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Stuart, thanks so much for the code.

As soon as I get to work tomorrow, I’m going to run it and see if this will work for everyone. Very exciting stuff! I’ll post back with the outcome.

Deb

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