Versions and Track Changes Security (2000)

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We are negotiating with a company and they would like a copy of our proposals – which are currently in the form of a digital copy of our contract with them in which we used the “track changes” feature to mark our proposed changes. The company would like a digital copy of our document showing the proposed changes. The document has currently been saved in versions, as we internally worked through our proposals. I would like to send the company a digital copy of only the most recent version (which was presented to them on paper), but without accepting the changes so that they can still see them as proposals compared to original.

I did not have a problem saving a copy of the document and deleting the old versions. However, if I open the document as a type “recover text from any file” , I can still see all the old versions, as well as all the records of who saved what when on what directory and in what computer. Which means that anyone at the company savvy enough to do that can read all that stuff as well.

There is an excellent article by Frank Rice which I was referred to elsewhere in these forums, but it was for 2002, not 2000, and while that tells how to clean out the save and drive info (at least in 2002 – I don’t find those tabs in 2000) it doesn’t address any way to address the tracked changes question other than to accept the changes, which isn’t what I want to do.

Is there any way to save this as a new document with ONLY the most recent version of the tracked changes?

Thanks in advance,
-cynthia

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I’m not sure this will help you but if it’s this article http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default….ProtectWord.asp [/url] – it does say that it applies to Word 2000 and if my memory serves correct, I have used it when our firm had Office 00.

I think unfortunately because your document has been the product of versions….that history of all revisions is in your new version no matter what you do – since you’re opting to leave them in the document. Not even a metadata cleaner will help (with the track changes issue but all other forms of metadata) since you can’t accept your revisions. Have you thought about maybe creating a PDF or are they demanding a Word document? If they are, could you do this? (I haven’t tested this to see if it will work – so I’m just thinking out loud here): take the recent version, save a copy and in that accept all the changes. Go back to the newest version, save a copy and reject all the changes. Now run a comparison between the two versions…..and see what that gets ya.

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That is an intriguing suggestion. I’ll play with it tomorrow and see where it gets me. I’ll let you know.
-cynthia

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That is an intriguing suggestion. I’ll play with it tomorrow and see where it gets me. I’ll let you know.
-cynthia

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Making two documents – accepting changes in one, rejecting in the other – then cutting and pasting into two new documents and using the “compare” feature worked slick as a whistle! Thank you for that suggestion. That is going to come in very handy in the future as well!
-cynthia

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Making two documents – accepting changes in one, rejecting in the other – then cutting and pasting into two new documents and using the “compare” feature worked slick as a whistle! Thank you for that suggestion. That is going to come in very handy in the future as well!
-cynthia

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I’m not sure this will help you but if it’s this article http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default….ProtectWord.asp [/url] – it does say that it applies to Word 2000 and if my memory serves correct, I have used it when our firm had Office 00.

I think unfortunately because your document has been the product of versions….that history of all revisions is in your new version no matter what you do – since you’re opting to leave them in the document. Not even a metadata cleaner will help (with the track changes issue but all other forms of metadata) since you can’t accept your revisions. Have you thought about maybe creating a PDF or are they demanding a Word document? If they are, could you do this? (I haven’t tested this to see if it will work – so I’m just thinking out loud here): take the recent version, save a copy and in that accept all the changes. Go back to the newest version, save a copy and reject all the changes. Now run a comparison between the two versions…..and see what that gets ya.

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You could use Save As and then try the macro in post 173394. I’m not sure how you clear out the old versions, but after “locking” the changes to simple direct text formatting, you should be able to copy and paste the content to a new document to shed the old stuff.

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That’s an interesting approach (I have a feeling they really want it in track changes mode so they can continue to make changes easily – had I realized, I would have started the document differently – oh well – next time!). I’ve used visual basic in Access, but never even put a macro into Word. I’m going to play with this tomorrow and see what happens. i’ll be a wizard at this stuff by the time I’m through!

Thanks,
-cynthia

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That’s an interesting approach (I have a feeling they really want it in track changes mode so they can continue to make changes easily – had I realized, I would have started the document differently – oh well – next time!). I’ve used visual basic in Access, but never even put a macro into Word. I’m going to play with this tomorrow and see what happens. i’ll be a wizard at this stuff by the time I’m through!

Thanks,
-cynthia

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You could use Save As and then try the macro in post 173394. I’m not sure how you clear out the old versions, but after “locking” the changes to simple direct text formatting, you should be able to copy and paste the content to a new document to shed the old stuff.

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I’m not sure if this will help but I had a very similar request recently. I had made extensive changes to a document without turning the ‘track changes’ on and then the legal department asked for a copy that showed the changes. I wasn’t about to redo all my changes to the original version so I just used the compare feature within word. I opened the marked up copy and asked it to compare that to the original. Word happily went to work and gave me a document with all the changes that I had made marked up as additions and deletions.

One thing that you could do is save the original version as a stand alone clean file (no versions), save the latest version as a stand alone clean file (again, no versions) and then use the compare documents feature to give you a version with only the most recent changes.

Is that what you were after?

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That sounds pretty similar to what I did in the end (described briefly above) – and it worked very well. I had never used “compare documents” before- and it’s come in handy a couple of times since, as well!

thanks,
-cynthia

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We have similar issues at my company: authors want to see the changes from one version to the next in their official documents.
The real problem I have with this is that there is a very high correlation between the use of Track Changes over many versions of a document and incidents of document corruption. Particularly, there seems to be a greater rate of corruption when authors use it while making formatting changes (page layout/sections and tables, in particular.)
What we have done is to take the position that the various document management systems (we use both Lotus Notes and Documentum) obviate the need to keep track changes on. We propose instead that the author can just compare different versions from the document management system whenever they need to, rather than to leave it (Track Changes) on. (It helps to emphasize that, if their document becomes badly corrupted, we can’t guarantee that we can fix it.)

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That sounds like a good idea.
-c

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That sounds like a good idea.
-c

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We have similar issues at my company: authors want to see the changes from one version to the next in their official documents.
The real problem I have with this is that there is a very high correlation between the use of Track Changes over many versions of a document and incidents of document corruption. Particularly, there seems to be a greater rate of corruption when authors use it while making formatting changes (page layout/sections and tables, in particular.)
What we have done is to take the position that the various document management systems (we use both Lotus Notes and Documentum) obviate the need to keep track changes on. We propose instead that the author can just compare different versions from the document management system whenever they need to, rather than to leave it (Track Changes) on. (It helps to emphasize that, if their document becomes badly corrupted, we can’t guarantee that we can fix it.)

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That sounds pretty similar to what I did in the end (described briefly above) – and it worked very well. I had never used “compare documents” before- and it’s come in handy a couple of times since, as well!

thanks,
-cynthia

Reply | Quote

I’m not sure if this will help but I had a very similar request recently. I had made extensive changes to a document without turning the ‘track changes’ on and then the legal department asked for a copy that showed the changes. I wasn’t about to redo all my changes to the original version so I just used the compare feature within word. I opened the marked up copy and asked it to compare that to the original. Word happily went to work and gave me a document with all the changes that I had made marked up as additions and deletions.

One thing that you could do is save the original version as a stand alone clean file (no versions), save the latest version as a stand alone clean file (again, no versions) and then use the compare documents feature to give you a version with only the most recent changes.

Is that what you were after?

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