Track changes vs. CR vs. DV etc.

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phanks (a/k/a Word Witch) asked the following in a recent post in an unrelated thread.

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I’m curious what problems you ran into with your compare issues when using the Hidden Paragraph marker and CompareRite and why the distate for Track Changes.

(not Track Changes!!heavens forbid) without doing a major cleanup of the blacklined version?. Has anyone out there used the hidden paragraph mark technique and obtained a blacklined version of a large corporate document that accurately reflects the editing changes?

I ask these questions because we’ve reached a point where we are evaluating and going through the decision making process on what to use for our redlining – Track Changes & Word Compare vs. CompareRite and DeltaView

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[/indent]This topic seems to deserve its own thread. It was probably discussed here a couple of months ago, but with so many new Loungers here it seems worth putting this up for discussion again.

Any opinions/views/rants regarding Word track changes, Compare Documents, CompareRite, DeltaView?
I know I’ve got some choice things to say, but will leave them for a separate post.
Anybody?

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Now, Gary… You know better than to ask me for an opinion or rant. Particularly on this subject.

Pam:
After a great amount of testing, our office has gone DeltaView by Workshare for the following reasons:

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I have to agree with Karen. My firm went through much the same decision process and ended up using DeltaView. It works more consistently than CompareRite – not as many problems trip it up – it’s well supported, and it doesn’t accrue Metadata as Track Changes does. The Metadata issue is one of the big reasons we don’t use Track Changes.

Lee

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The concern over metadata seems to be because it breaches confidentiality and client/privelege. In what way? And has it been considered a professional liability issue on a firm for such a breach?

The things of which I’m aware of as metadata are:
1) the info it accrues under File|Properties
2) the comments, and track changes name identifying info
3) username info from Tools|Options|User Information
4) any style names that are named with a firm identifier
5) versions that might have been pocketed in the document using Word’s native versioning feature
6) I know if you crack a doc open using WordPad it will disclose where the document came from by noting all the printers that the document has been printed from, the user name, whether it was a converted document by indicating extraneouos WordPerfect codes like [quickmark] and [wp typographic symbols] and the path on the network that the document came from and user information. All this info is embedded I guess in the file header?

Have I missed any of the pockets of metadata? And the metadata scrubbers you speak of, do they remove the info even in the instance of #6?

And is #5 one of the things that crashes CompareRite?

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There’s more than what you mention. Run this test and you’ll see how metadata can compromise privilege:

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For an eye-opener, see this article from the Industry Standard:

No Thanks for the Memories

Now, where can I get a good hex editor?

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Even more interesting is where this came from

D&KChristmas2K.doc
D&KCHR~1.DOC
D&KChristmas2K.wbk
ObjectPool
ObjectPool
istmasList2K.wbk
BACKU~33.WBK
net_Granny2kChristmasLtr.doc

If you just did what you said why would it contain a ref to your Christmas list???

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Thanks, David. I was out of town on business and this is my first evening back (dear Lord do I have a lot to read!). Even more disturbing, I took the file which I had opened with recover all text, and put it through the metacleaner from Payne Consulting before attaching… hmmmm… can we ever be free from metadata — and those files (there’s actually 3 different ones mentioned) were never part of it. Must be that memory swap thing…

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Perhaps the metadata is in your normal.dot

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You’ve missed some major metadata confidentiality risks. Versions, enable Fast Saves are two. Comments and hidden text are another two.
See Confidentiality (http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/metadata.htm) for more.

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Sorry, I am doing this too late at night. (3:00 am here)

You didn’t miss the risks, I missed your listing them. I believe that the scrubbers get out virtually everything, certainly the four that I mentioned.

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Word Witch said:
I know we had a thread going regarding metadata issues but I’ve lost my way back to it. Actually I think it was under a topic on comparison software. Anyway, I got a tip from a friend that saving to .rtf should eliminate the metadata problem if .pdf is not an *option*. Anybody got a spin on that?

___Word Witch__

Response. Sounds like a good plan if .rtf will hold your document.

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Saving a Word97 doc as RTF doesn’t remove ALL metadata. As and example, things such as unused list definitions and document corruptions still hang around. However, if the file is then opened in Word95 and saved before coming back into Word97 then many of those oddities get removed.

So the moral of the story is not to just save as RTF, there is metadata that survives this step.

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Microsoft, itself, recommends using a third-party solution to compare documents. See Track Changes (http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/track changes.htm).

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IMPORTANT NOTE: Microsoft recommends that most law firms use a third party solution for document comparison, such as Lexis-Nexis’ CompareRite, or Workshare’s Deltaview. See the chapter on third party solutions for more information about these products. Microsoft Word’s compare documents features works on relatively simple documents that do not contain too much complex formatting. Because of the complex nature of most legal documents, Word’s compare documents feature does not produce as good a result as the third party products mentioned above. Microsoft is currently working to address this shortcoming, but in the meantime the third party solutions are recommended.
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When used with Automatic Numbering, John McGhie seems to think that Track Changes can break the numbering system. Word’s Numbering Explained by John McGhie (http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/)

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Wow Charles, I started reading the article you recommended by John McGhie and it has left me totally confused. If I’m understanding what he writes, he indicates that Word numbering is not portable from machine to machine but I’ve not found that to be entirely true. The disaster that I have found numbering to be is when it is directly applied and I’ve avoided sharing the wonders of list num and seq codes here to avoid unnecessary document demons. We adopted the method of tieing numbering to styles recommended by MicroSystems in their article regarding the 7 laws of style and numbering. We’ve used it quite successfully and find that the numbering always follows with the document and anyone opening it inherits the number list scheme. However, I will delve further into the article you pointed to though because without a doubt documents will be served up to us from other sources and the information will prove invaluable.

With regards to the track changes reference and numbering in that article, perhaps it’s late and I’m just too tired, but I didn’t find it. I’ll rest tonight and read up tomorrow. As ever, thanks!

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we’ve had very good experiences when using numbering tied to heading styles. It has proven to be very stable, even when revised and revised and revised, which is not the case when numbering is not tied to styles. We also use SoftWise Numbering Suite to simplify the process of creating paragraph numbering and formatting heading styles. I think it works beautifully and most of our users have not had any problems understanding it.

Lee

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Sorry if I misled you. The method recommended by MicroSystems is the same method recommended by McGhie and he has found it to remove most of the demons. He says it isn’t bulletproof and that the only bulletproof method he knows is using {SEQ} fields. But, he says that this is too complex for most users.

With regard to the track changes, it may not have been in that article but in some of his newsgroup posts.

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Hi Pam,

I read John McGhie’s article and had a similar reaction – it’s much too pessimistic! – there are ways to end up with reasonably stable results (sounds like you are using one of them). That article may be unnecessarily alarming people.

Have a look at this earlier thread for some discussion of successfully creating outline numbering, either manually or programatically. In that discussion Andrew Lockton took the side of doing them via code, and I took the side of doing them manually.

Both Andrew and I offered to e-mail further info on these, on request. (Send me a private message with your e-mail details if you want a copy of the guide I created some time ago.)

Since that earlier discussion, I’ve started experimenting with working with outline numbering via code, and the results are pretty impressive. It is fairly simple to do, but I think requires a modicum of VBA knowhow as I found it necessary to go in and tweak things here and there.

My current view on doing these is evolving: I still think it’s necessary to know how to set these up manually first. But once you have this set up perfectly, it’s possible to easily record a macro that records every setting you’ve just set up manually. And there are a lot of directions you can go from there. One worth mentioning is being able to easily fix your outline numbering anytime it gets damaged, just by running the code you recorded of the outline list in its proper form.

There’s more to it than that but it’s a good start…

Regards,
Gary

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