Problem with Compare and Merge Docs / Track Changes

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Guest

Hello all

We are having a problem with the Compare and Merge Documents function.
Occassionally when using this function, all of the differences between the
two documents shows as insertions, rather than some changes as insertions and
some as deletions as is normally the case.

This problem does not occur all the time. If I test this function with the
same two documents, sometimes it will work fine, and sometimes it will not.
I cannot detect any pattern to when it does or does not work.

One user has also said that they have had this problem using the "Track
Changes" function (i.e. all deletions being recorded as insertions), but I
have not been able to confirm this.

I have checked the MS Knowledge Documents, and cannot find anything relating
to this fault. Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone know a way to
stop it?

Thank you in advance for your replies.

MMH
 
Hi MMH

Here are a few things to try:

1. Use the Reviewing toolbar. (If it's not visible, do View > Toolbars and
select the Reviewing toolbar.) There you can choose different views of your
document: the original (before any tracked changes), Original showing
markup, Final showing markup and Final. If users are familiar with previous
versions of Word, then this is entirely new. So it's worth investigating how
it works.

2. Check Tools > Templates and Add-ins. Is the "Automatically update
document styles" box ticked? If so, then you would expect to see some styles
updated every time you open the document. Un-tick it, make a minor change
(eg spacebar then backspace) and save.

3. Compare and Merge is a bit flaky on big documents. Sometimes it will show
that the entire document has changed, even when there are only minor
differences between the documents. Also I suspect (but cannot confirm) that
comparing A with B may get different results from comparing B with A. You
would expect that the results would be the opposite, but sometimes they're
just different!

Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word
 
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