Re: Cannot activate "Track Changes" on Word 2004 for Mac

John,

Thanks. Sure, but the problem is that we may have about 5,000 edit points or more in a 50 to 100 page document every time it goes to revision by a single co-author (most of the times we check and accept all changes). So, for us, "Track Changes" is absolutely required. In such scenario it would be a real nightmare to compare documents...

I look forward to Office 2008. Any tentative date?

Hint for Microsoft MBU (if possible): hopefully Word 2008 will not crash unexpectedly when copy/paste applications like CopyPaste http://www.scriptsoftware.com/copypaste/ or iClip http://inventive.us/iClip are active, as now is the case with Office 2004.

Thanks.
Regards,

---

On 2007-04-06 01:58:38 +0200, "John McGhie" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Hi Tony:

You mean apart from Upgrading to Office 2008?? :-) When it goes on sale,
Office 2008 will prevent this problem occuring.

In the Word .doc file format, all of the formatting (and most everything
else except the actual character strings) is contained in a series of
look-up tables in the binary file format. These properties and attributes
are all called in with binary pointers that indicate which rows of the
tables apply to each piece of text.

It's the binary tables that seem to corrupt. These are re-created when you
de-corrupt the document. But yes, you do lose some formatting, picture and
page sizes, etc. And it's very difficult to know which of the decorruption
methods will result in the least damage in any particular document. I shy
away from the HTML method for most of my work because it converts all
pictures to PNG bitmaps, and I use a lot of vectore art. But other than
that, it's pretty good. Round-tripping through RTF fixes "some" problems,
but generally RTF makes such a faithful copy of the document that it copies
the problem as well, so I rarely use or advise that one. Copying all but
the last paragraph mark (some of us know that as a "Maggie") fixes the
widest range of problems, but is potentially the most destructive. Of
course when you're desperate you can round-trip through Plain Text (or use
"Recover text from any file" to open the document. Either way, you lose ALL
the formatting but you get your text back.

My suggestion is that you avoid tracked changes if you have an unskilled
editor or a diffeent version of Word in your workflow. Use Compare
Documents instead: it's much less likely to result in problems :-)

Hope this helps


.

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