In a previous issue http://news.office-watch.com/?12 we gave a simple overview of the reviewing features in Word. When you strip away all the fancy jargon and marketing hype then you are left with a simple way to share a document and let people make changes without any re-typing.

In this issue we’ll look at some more features and tricks for reviewing in Word, including answering some questions arising from the first issue in this series.

Changes you made in the meantime

When you open an incoming document in recent versions of Word it should detect that this is an edited version of an original document, and it should offer to merge the edits into the document saved on your hard drive.

This is handy because it means that you can keep making changes to a document after you send it out for revision. When the edited document comes back your edits and those from the ‘outsider’ can be integrated into a single document.

We’ve rarely seen this work properly. There’s an option in Word 2003 to include a unique identifier in each document (which lets Word work out if a document is the ‘same’ as one you worked on before) but often it refuses to work.

Many people try to ‘help’ by renaming the document they send back. You send a document ‘FredDagg.doc’ and it comes back as ‘FredDagg edited by Bruce Bayliss.doc’. This seems to make it harder for Word to do its automatic magic.

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Merging documents

If Word can’t tell the incoming file is part of a document you’re working on, all is not lost.

You can use the Merge function to highlight the differences between two documents.

Open one document then go to Tools | Compare and Merge documents to choose the document to compare with. With the default settings the second document is opened with the differences from the first document marked as changes.

On the dialog to select the second document you have some choice (these vary, and we’ll list those in Word 2003):

• Legal Blackline is useful for people who are not lawyers. This option creates a new, third, document which has the first document as a ‘baseline’ plus differences with the second document applied as tracked changes. You can use the Reviewing Pane to see what changes where made. Neither of the original documents are altered.
• Find Formatting lets you ignore any formatting changes (bold, fonts etc) and just focus on changes in the wording, images etc.

If you don’t choose ‘Legal Blackline’ then you have three options on the Merge button:

• Merge, changes in the open (first) document are shown in the second document you’re about to select
• Merge into current document, is the reverse of the first option. Changes in the second document you’re about to select are shown in the ‘first’ document already open.
• Merge into new document, creates a new document with the common parts of the two docs as the baseline and the differences from the two source documents showing as changes.

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Compare

The Compare feature lets you put two documents side-by-side for you the check them manually.

Open both documents in Word.

Choose Window | Compare documents

Both documents will appear side-by-side with a special toolbar on the screen with three buttons:

• Synchronous scrolling is what makes this feature special. As you scroll through one document the other document moves by the same amount. Click on this button to turn the auto-scrolling on or off. If the two documents get out of sync, turn synchronous scrolling off, put the documents into sync manually then turn it back on again.
• Reset window position, puts the two documents back into ‘side by side’ positions if they’ve been moved around on the screen.
• Close Side-by-Side will turn the feature off.

You can edit either or both documents normally while in side-by-side mode. That includes copying and pasting between the documents.

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If they don’t have Word

If the editor (person you send the document to) doesn’t have Microsoft Word or they turned Track Changes off you still have options.

Most, if not all, word-processors can read Microsoft Word (.doc) files. Even Wordpad in Windows XP can open and edit a .doc file. While they won’t have access to the Track Changes / Reviewing features they can still edit the document and send it back to you.

If you’re really desperate you should save the document in RTF format and send that out for comments. When it comes back you’ll have to save it as a Word document before using the Merge feature.

The Merge documents feature works regardless of how the documents were created or edited. As long as the two documents are Word documents you can merge them.

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What did I do?

There’s a clever use of Revisions / Track Changes which is also covered in detail in Peter’s Office BACKUP Handbook http://shop.office-watch.com/obh .

You can turn on Track Changes for documents you are only going to work on yourself. When you do you’ll save all your edits to the document from then on. Changing to ‘Final showing Markup’ view will let you see past changes (different word selections, deleted paragraphs) and give you a chance to recover them.

This might seem pointless but can be extremely useful with a long and complex document, for you have the option to ‘see’ ideas, expressions and wordings that you might have discarded but have second thoughts about.

If nothing else, turning on Track Changes and having the view set to Final means you won’t notice any difference while working on your document, unless and until you need it.

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Removing the changes in the final document

The biggest problem with Track Changes is at the last step, when you have the document finalized and ready to go out. As we noted in the last issue this can be a real and embarrassing problem.

Microsoft loves to talk about ‘meta data’ by which they mean all the extra info in a file aside from the obvious and visible document contents. If you go to File | Properties you’ll see all sorts of information about the document which you might not expect.

If you are sending the document as a file you probably don’t want the track changes and other details to be available to the receiver.

You’d think and hope that simply applying Accept Changes or Reject Changes to all the edits in the document would be enough – but alas that’s not enough.

Microsoft has an add-in tool for Office 2003 and Office XP which will remove all this extra info from the document. There are problems with this tool listed at http://office-watch.com/kb?834636

If you won’t want to use that technique there’s a clumsy but effective hack. Save the final document in the RTF format which can’t contain any past changes etc. Then send out that RTF version.

Another advantage of using RTF is that it can’t contain any macros or viruses, so there is no risk of spreading (or being accused of spreading) any nasties.