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

John,

Thanks for the feedback.

The problem was that in this case I made the changes, sent the document to a PC-Windows person and such person accepted such changes and sent an apparently "corrupted" document back to me. So, I did not have much control over it. I must say that we love the Track Changes feature of Word. It is awesome. We only want it to work well and not misbehave corrupting documents (if possible).

Concerning third party applications that crash Word, you are right, but in this particular case of copy/paste applications, the issue arises only with Word and has been around for many years now over many Mac versions and Office versions. Both on Mac PowerPC and Mactel. Surprisingly, not other application (and we use hundreds of them) has ever had such a problem. To my knowledge, it has to do with the somewhat nonstandard way of managing memory of Word. One evidence of it is that somehow when you copy something in Word, such clipboard does not “belong” to the Mac but to Word. That is why if then Word crashes, such copied contents do not show in the clipboard. I have been in touch with the developers of such applications but they say that it depends on Microsoft and that they will try to get Microsoft to fix it. Yet, for years, as said, the issue has not been fixed.

Besides, as far a I know, CopyPaste and iClip are not haxies or software that interacts directly and specifically with Word. They are simply applications that have multiple copy/paste clipboards and you can use them with any Mac application. As said, only Word crashes with them. EndNote for example is a haxie as you indicate, and I am with you on that, but not CopyPaste or iClip as far as I understand.

Last but not least, and a bit off-topic BUT RELATED TO THE ABOVE ISSUE, there is a single feature that I would love to see in Word 2008: copy and paste without style with a one-click menu for it, a one-click button on toolbar for it and --most importantly-- a simple keyboard command for it. For instance (as Eudora does):

Copy unformatted (plain) text: Shift Command C
Paste unformatted (plain) text: Shift Command V

We may use the latter hundreds of times each single day and it is really tedious to go trough the "Edit/Paste Special/Unformatted Text/OK" each time. Because the “Paste Options” contextual popup clipboard icon to select "Keep Text Only" does not show many times when you paste something in a Word document. That seems a flaw-bug of Word to me, but that is what happens.

THAT IS RELATED TO THE ABOVE CRASH ISSUE WITH COPY/PASTE applications because almost 100% of the times we want to paste plain text, and Word never crashes if we paste plain text.

Any place to send such suggestions to Microsoft MBU? And most importantly, any way to become an Office 2008 beta tester for Mac? I would love to contribute bugs, flaws and many suggestions to improve it on Mac. I am a “heavy” user of Office in general and Word in particular on Mac.

Thanks again for your kind support,

-------------------

On 2007-04-06 04:19:38 +0200, "John McGhie" <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Hi Tony:

That's just the situation where I *would* use Compare Documents.

1) Get the document back.

2) Immediately Accept All Changes in Document and Save

3) Make a copy and Save

4) Make your 5,000 edits and Save

5) Use Compare Documents to indicate the changes and Send.

You put all changes in in a single operation, and since Word is doing it,
there is very little chance of corrupting the document.

Making 5,000 changes in a 50-page document is practically guaranteed to
corrupt the thing, unless your editors are REALLY expert. Persoally, I
wouldn't try it -- I have only 30 years experience at this kind of thing :-)

Microsoft has published "indications" of the Office 2008 time line on its
website: that information is more up-to-date than any that we have or had.
ou need to watch their website, which currently says "Scheduled to be
available in the second half of 2007". There's a question in my mind as to
whether that means "Calendar year" or "Fiscal Year" :-)

Now let me address the thorny subject of "Haxies" (Third-party software that
interacts with software made by a different manufacturer.) First off: The
manufacturer of the original software can only control what IT does. So in
this case Microsoft's responsibility stops at the line between the software
it made, and everything else. Provided Word runs fine in its native state,
Microsoft has done a good job.

If some other company produces software to work with Microsoft Word, it's up
to them to ensure that their software does not crash Word

They are in control of it: they are the ones that can take action here. One
can crash any piece of software by hitting it hard enough in an unexpected
spot. Quality programmers ensure their application doesn't do that.

If Microsoft were to make a change to prevent, say, CopyPate from crashing
Word, chances are that may cause crashes in Excel or PowerPoint, or more
likely, in someone else's software. It's an endless circle of gotchas.
Large-scale software developers know never to dare venture down that path.

That said, if the creator of third-party software contacts Microsoft, they
will get all the assistance they need to adjust their software so that it
DOESN'T crash the Microsoft software. If the makers of those utilities were
to do so NOW, they would be able to test their utilities with the next
versions of Apple OS X and Microsoft Office. If they get on the job, by the
time the new products go on sale they will have removed any potential
problems their utilities cause.

But if we get a rash of complaints from users when Office 2008 appears,
showing that certain utilities cause crashes in the new version (and I am
sure we will) then the MVPs and all the other people who hang around here
will be here, helping users to overcome these problems. But Microsoft will
simply smile and say "Well, we tried! We invited you to engage us early so
you had time to remove the problems."

Behind the scenes, Microsoft is already testing well-known haxies with the
new versions of its software: particularly the more popular ones. If they
detect problems, they advise the vendors and provide help to overcome them.

If you have found problems with some applications, I encourage you to
encourage them to engage Microsoft about these no, while they have time to
fix them. The new versions of Microsoft Office will be Universal Binaries,
so they will have to make changes anyway to get their utilities to work at
all: it would be good if they grabed the opportunity to do it right this
time :-)

Hope this helps


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