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Has anyone else run into problems when using Office 365 Word with Teams, after enabling “Lock Track Changes”?

I am finding strange freezes when Lock Track Changes is enabled, that seem to be triggered by the presence of a custom Table of Contents, exacerbated by Autosave.

The workaround seems to be deleting the TOC during the editing phase, then after all of the sticky fingers are out of the doc, replacing it.  But I’m not happy doing that.  Highlighting in the TOC has always been a quick way to let the team know what sections need attention.

Any ideas?  Is this a known bug?

Kim Salazar, proposal drone

 

If your final product is PDF, I’d suggest an alternative approach, provided you have Acrobat Full or Capture It or some other utility that takes a clean snippet of a PDF page.

Set up the table to the proportions you want it in a scrap document. Create a PDF of the document. Using Acrobat’s image capture feature (or your screen capture utility) snip out the table. Paste it back into your target document as a graphic, rotated however you want on the final page. You could even paste the snippet into a text box or frame that carries the caption in your desired portrait orientation.

It’s not the most elegant solution, and you do need to keep track of the supplemental page bits which can be a pain. Putting the scrap bits at the end of the source document and only PDF’ing the desired page range might help keep your rotated table originals from being lost.

kbsalazar, proposal drone

Thanks both to Hans and Stuart!

On using the index feature with /f option – I’m having problems segregating out items destined for the index that I use to build the glossary, and items tagged as controlled info. The /f flag may be just the ticket, allowing me to have two indices running in the same document, each compiling different items. The key will be if I can make the glossary index ignore the /f flagged items.

On using captions – I’ve already got captions compiling up to a table of exhibits. I don’t use table tags. I’ll see if I can use that label for this purpose, but all I’m interested in is an in-line list of page numbers of pages bearing flagged items – not a separate page containing a roster of them all.

Again thanks!

Kim Salazar, proposal drone (off to make this thing work…)

Thanks!

While this should work and probably does in current Visio versions, I’m afraid that in my ancient version of Visio Strange Things Happen when text goes through the paste special function. First, regardless of the paste special option picked, any shape pasted that way loses its fill color, and the ability to be re-colored. That’s not so big a deal, as I can always separate the box bearing the base shape and the one containing the text, then overlay the text on the base shape. The second is that no matter how the box is flipped, the text never becomes mirrored on the vertical axis. Rotated, yes; but mirror-flipped – no.

But your base idea is very good, so I tried it in out in Microsoft Paint, hoping to do my flipping there, then paste back into Visio. Surprise of surprises! I get the same problem when I paste my Visio-created text into Microsoft. Paint Text rotates clockwise and counterclockwise, but never mirror-flips along the vertical axis. BUT text composed native in Paint CAN be flipped to appear in mirror image.

I’ve kludged up an interim solution using your idea via MPaint, but I think that the text rotation thing may be a bug in Visio 2000. I suspect I’ll have to finally shell out to upgrade my ancient version to the current one.

Again thanks!

K.im, just because the software is old doesn’t mean it isn’t (mostly) useful

Excellent suggestion, if I wanted all the text on the page to read mirrored*. But I just want one text box among the dozens on the page flipped. I’m beginning to think I need to draw out the words using shapes rather than text, because I can’t see any other way to do it. Suggestions most welcome!

Again thanks,

-k.

* We used to do the printer flipping the page trick to make printouts of driving directions. When laid on a car’s dashboard, the righted semi-reflection of the mirrored text in the windshield was a poor man’s heads-up data display.

If image quality isn’t a live or die issue and you can live with the pages as inserted graphics rather than editable text, you can paste each page of the *.pdf into the Word document as a separate snapshot.

First open the *.pdf. Make the screen image as large as you can while still fitting the whole page on your screen in one visible gulp. Click on the camera tool. Use the cursor to box the area you wish to “photograph.” The resulting image will be placed in your clipboard. Now go to your Word file, and paste the image as a graphic. Not pretty, not perfect, but very often good enough.

ksalazar, proposal drone

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

You’ll go nuts trying to use the Word drawing feature if your diagram has the least bit of complexity to it (more than two boxes with an arrow in between). My first choice would be Visio, but that’s not available to you. My second choice would be PowerPoint.

Be careful pasting the PP graphic into Word, especially if you intend on resizing it. If all else fails, try “Paste Special” You’ll lose the ability to edit in-document, but fonts and size ratios will be preserved.

ksalazar, proposal drone

Thank you both Hans and Stuart. Hans’ solution works for the Crisis du Jour. Stuart’s will take care of Crises To Come. You’ve saved me yet again.

Quivering in gratitude,
ksalazar, proposal drone

Very useful! Thank you.

BUT is there any way short of writing a macro and running it on my documents to keep EVERY instance of a particular word in that document intact? Example: If my company’s name was Somewhere and I never wanted to see Some- where, is there any way to “paint” that word with a never-hyphenate-me-ever brush?

Thanks in advance for any help!

ksalazar, proposal drone

The pasted image may not actually be cropped. By fiddling around, I’ve managed to paste images into text boxes and frames when I didn’t think I was doing so.

If you try to paste a picture into a text box or frame you might run into problems if the margin window of the encapsulating box or frame may be smaller than the image’s dimensions. The whole image is there, but you only see the part within the text box/frame’s window. You can tell if the image is in a box if when you click on the image, the available margin white area on the vertical or horizontal rulers is smaller than it is when you click elsewhere on the page. If it is in a box, either remove the text box or frame, or drag the box’s margins large enough to display the whole image.

Perfect! Thanks! I’ll try it out.

-K.

Unless the index field code was locked with a CTRL-F11, wouldn’t the improved index be killed and replaced by a new autogenerated one – without the improvements – when the thing was sent to print?

Kim

Not in Word 2000. But it does in Word 2003! Solution: Stop using 2000, or learn to suffer this annoyance with a smile.

Rich,

I’d be interested in hearing our expert brothers and sisters chime in on this one.

Right now I follow a multi-step procedure. First I past my images in as in-line graphics (as opposed to floating graphics), so that the image is firmly associated with a paragraph marker. I use a style (image) to govern spacing before and after the image. Then I insert a caption immediately after the image using the Insert-caption dialog. After I’ve got both, I highlight them together and do an Insert Text Box. I stretch out the box to the desired size (more or less); then transform the Text Box to a frame (on the text box dialog window). I then highlight everything in the frame and kill the outlines (if my settings introduced them in the first place). I have to be careful to highlight the entire contents of a frame when killing outlines because if I make a change to just one paragraph, that paragraph is popped out of the parent frame into a new one all its own. The reason I bother with frames at all is that the automatic table of figures feature won’t pick up and report captions that appear in text boxes. Captions in frames however are gathered up properly.

If anyone has a better method, please enlighten the rest of us…

ksalazar, Proposal Drone