Revision tracking by reason

[Guest]

The default methods for tracking revisions in Word (any version) are very
limiting. I work on Gov contracts where revisions can happen to a document
for several reasons. E.g., Fig 4 changes because the manufacturer changes a
part number (CR#1, i.e. change request 1) but Fig 5 changes because the
install script has been streamlined (CR#2).

In this setting, it is not practical to have Engineer1 make the Fig 4 change
and Engineer2 make the change to Fig 5 just to have the rev marks color
coded. The documents are hundreds of pages long and over the course of a
year (we redeliver the docs to the customer on a yearly basis), any one
document might have 20 or 30 different CRs applied that each has to be
separately recognized and traceable to the particular CR that drove the
change.

We track all these changes in a database (DOORS) but our deliverable is a
word document, not the database or a report from the database.

What I really want is a way to have a reason code next to each change bar,
i.e. CR001 alongside one revision bar and CR002 alongside another one. I'll
settle for a reliable way to indicate single red bar is CR001, single blue
bar is CR002, double red bar is CR003, etc. or even place a small drawing,
wordart or comment associated with the change bar to indicate the reason for
change.

Someone has to have figured out how to do this.


Ed

 

[Guest]

Hi Ed-

If you are asking for a way to have Word automatically recognize the reason
for change and put the correct code in along with the tracking of the change,
I don't pretend to have any idea.

If this is something the user making the change will add, however, won't the
Insert>Comment feature get the job done? There may also be some use for the
File>Versions feature for each occurence of change.

HTH |:>)

 

[Guest]

That is a way to do it but it has several problems.
-It is not very efficient. You have to make the change then select the
changed text and add the comment.
-In order to see the comment with the text, you have to turn the bubbles on
(the reviewing pane is not aaceptable in this case). Turning the bubbles on
changes the format of the printed page. The document then does not look the
same as the original (displayed/printed font sizes change, margins change,
etc). Revision marks are nice small marks in the margins that don't change
the look of the document in and of themselves.
-There is no global way to delete comments the way one can accept or reject
all changes and make the revision codes all go away.

Ed

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'll buy all of your reasons except the last: You can select Delete All
Comments in Document on the Reject Change menu.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I'm really confused about what you are hoping for, partially because you use
CR for change request in paragraph 1, then in paragraph 4 CR appears to mean
the reason behind the change request, and to me those would be two different
things.

I'm totally clueless as to what color coding the revision marks might do for
you. If you wanted to track the reason for the change, and you only have 9
or so reasons to change something, you could manipulate the colors on the
same computer by changing the User Information in Word. But I have this
feeling your mention of colors is a total red herring.

I'm kinda suspecting that what you would like is numbered changes, so that
you can always track Change 1 to Change Request 1. Is that right?

If you clarified what you needed, there might be a way to get it.

Alternatively, aren't there other document management programs (vaguely
thinking Delta View) that might be worth investigating?

 

[Guest]

Thank you. I learned something new today.

Ed

I'll buy all of your reasons except the last: You can select Delete All
Comments in Document on the Reject Change menu.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

In my gov't contracting world, a CR is a change vehicle for controlled
documents. It documents what the change should be as well as the reason for
the change. The changes are meant to be grouped around a central reason
driving the change. There may be many changes documented in a single CR. A
CR is not restricted to a single document either. The CR could document
changes in dozens of document. But, they are all being changed for the same
reason.

So, the term CR is used as a shorthand for the reason for the change as well
as shorthand for the entire set of changes related to that reason that are
documented within the CR.

The realtionship between CRs and controllled documents is, in general, a
many to many relationship.

Ed

 

[Guest]

Sorry, I forgot to address your other points.

Using color coded change bars is not practical for several reasons.
-Over the course of a documents life, dozens of CRs might be written against
it. If I only had to deal with 9, I would be in heaven.
-Multiple engineers can write different CRs against the same document.
-Multiple engineers may make different contributeions to the same CR. I have
a CR right now that has the contributions of 20 different engineers across 3
different documents. Two of the docs are requirements specification (e.g.
Function XYZ shall report the value of alpha twenty times per second.) and
one of them is an algorithm document that contains the equations for the
system (e.g. alpha is the double integral of all gammas over the solution
space of deltas in the complex plane).

Yes, I am looking for some way identify changes. Numbering them is a way to
do it. I need to give large groups of changes the same number.

Could we get a new document management system? Of course we can, it's your
money after all (Gov contracting = tax dollars at work.). We used to be an
Interleaf shop. This kind of thing required no thought in Interleaf. The
problem there was that the licensing costs did not allow for individuals to
have their own copy. Telecommuting was a non-starter because the network
performance was atrocious for both the app and the license server.
"Everybody" has MS Word. The indirect cost savings from using that
established infrastructure is tremendous. We just have this tiny little
limitation in Word that causes hours of frustration.

There must a macro out there that can do what I need.

Ed

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Ed,

I wouldn't call this a "tiny little limitation" of Word -- it's a major
requirement that Word was never designed to satisfy. As an analogy, think of
someone saying "We need to get a million commuters a day from New York to
Los Angeles. We used to use passenger jets, but they cost too much, and
airports are a hassle. Everybody has a car, so we'll let them drive instead.
There must be a road out there somewhere that can take the traffic."

IMNSHO, you need a document management/change management system built on a
database, and it needs to be validated against your requirements. It may use
Word as the editing front end, but Word is not going to serve well as the
system's foundation.

 

[Guest]

An aside:
I like your analogy. It makes a valid point. Unfortunately, the US did
something very similar to what you are describing. In the 1950s we decided
to build an interstate highway system rather than expand the the passenger
rail system, partly for the reasons you descibe. Train tracks were expensive
to maintain (the pesky little things kept vibrating and moving when a train
would go over them) and rail stations were a pain. So we built the
interstate highway system to make all our lives better.

Back to the issue at hand:
We have a document management system built on a database with a Word front
end (it's DOORS, read my first note again). However, the customer insists on
the final deliverable to him being a Word document, not a database snapshot
or database report. And, 'Oh, by the way', the customer wants to be able to
see which changes happened for which reason.

I know the customer wants something Word was not originally designed to do.
I know there are probably new/different/other document management systems
that might be able to meet this customer's needs. I was just hoping that
folks that know and understand a lot more about Word than I do might have
figured out how to do this or be willing to take on the challenge of
developing a macro(s) that can.

If it can't be done, then tell me it can't and I'll go back to my little
corner of the world.

Ed

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Ed,

I've thought about your problem some more, and I've come up with a
template that demonstrates some ideas you may be able to use. You can
download it from http://jay-freedman.info/changerequest.zip.

The underlying idea is a special paragraph style, which I've named
CRnum, that includes a frame to position it in the left margin. You
can change its font, etc. to suit your needs. This style needs to be
defined in the template used to base your documents, so it becomes a
member of the Styles collection in each document where you want to use
this mechanism. The rest of the machinery can be in the same template
or in a global template (one stored in Word's Startup folder).

The other piece of the scheme is a userform (custom dialog) that lets
the user enter the CR number to apply to the current change.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge Word doesn't have any way to display
this userform automatically, so it has to be triggered by a keystroke
or button. The sample template has it assigned to Ctrl+Shift+M and to
a floating custom toolbar.

I assume that there is no way to determine programmatically which CR
number applies to any particular change, so the user has to type the
number into the userform and click OK (or hit Enter). The text, such
as CR001, is placed in the margin next to the current paragraph.

That's another limitation of this scheme, and one that may be a
show-stopper: The CR numbers are attached to paragraphs; they can't be
attached to specific tracked changes. If the paragraph contains
multiple changes, the CR numbers may or may not be in the same order.

With some more work and maybe some "eureka" ideas, this might be made
more flexible and more convenient.