Hi Tim,
You can use Word 2000, 2002 or 2003 to open and save .docX documents by
installing the MS Office Compatibility Pack
http://microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466
The compatibility pack it won't add the 2007 new feature sets to the older
versions.
You can also read .docX files with the MS Word Viewer
http://microsoft.com/DownLoads/details.aspx?familyid=3657CE88-7CFA-457A-9AEC-F827F20CAC
As Suzanne mentioned the tracked changes feature doesn't turn itself on.
What can trigger it is that within the document itself Word detects that
there are date/time listed entries of modifications (i.e. tracking was on,
and it is journalling the details within the document). If you turn off
tracking in a document that is already tracking them it should stop tracking
the forward changes. Do you have steps to reproduce it doing otherwise?
In Word 2007, you can use Office Button=>Prepare=>Inspect the documet
to 'clean house' in a document, but use it sparingly as the out of the box
version can remove wide groups of items you might want to keep.
In Word 2007 there is, as you're aware, also the
View=>Changes=>Accept=>Accept All changes in document button.
You can right click on that choice and add it to the Quick Access Toolbar,
and you can also do that with the Inspect Document command.
One of the points of the feature is to make it more visible that you may
have changes in the document that aren't finalized that you didn't mean to
have others see. Those 'oops' moments can have a more frustrating effect
than clearing out the items ahead of time. One of the folks here who do
more with macros can probably suggest a macro that would clear track changes
when saving a document as part of the save action.
================
What I don't understand is why Microsoft doesn't have a choice to just
configure Word (and the rest of Office 2007, though I primarily use Word) so
that changes just are never tracked period, not from this point on, or not
since I opened the document and turned off tracking changes, but not at any
time in any document. When I create documents, I don't want to wade through
menus to accept changes, delete comments, view in Final format as opposed to
Final Showing Markup, and all the rest of the stuff. I want to create
documents that only know about what's shown on the screen since I last hit
the Save button. If I want to have multiple versions of documents just in
case I want to change something or return to an earlier version, I save the
document in multiple versions, just like I used to before Microsoft decided
for me how I should work.
If I didn't have to read documents in the current version with docx
extensions, I'd be using an older version because Microsoft has decided that
I should have to track all changes even though I don't want to. It's
incredible that there's a way that someone else can go back and turn on some
button on their system so that they can view the changes I've so carefully
edited out, unless I take several steps to prevent this. It would be okay
for Microsoft to allow people to track changes and all that - I do
understand
that there are companies that want to or need to track them, but to not
offer
an option not to is really frustrating to those of us who don't want to
track
changes. >>
