Track and Merge Changes Confusion

[Chris]

I'm having some problems with Word 2003's Track and Merge Changes.
Here's the information:

There is an article, approximately 150 pages, with approximately 500
footnotes. Roughly thirty people have verified various parts of the
article, checking format and footnotes. Each reviewer has saved their
changes to their own document. Now, I want to merge these 30-odd files
back into the original. However, problems abound! The most serious is
that once the second file is merged, it starts to reinsert the original
components that were deleted by another reviewer. In addition, the
footnotes start to become deleted. For example, one reviewer will
change footnote 146. When the next document is merged, footnote 146 is
deleted, and the footnote is now found as 147. there is a gap where
146 was. Another document will delete 147, with the footnote now found
at 148.

I've tried merging with and without "Find Formatting" and every
permutation of where and how to merge documents my meager mind can come
up with. Any help is greatly appreciated.

chris

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Chris,

Basically, document merge works when the changes in both documents have
been accepted (or rejected), so you're starting with documents containing
NO changes whatsoever. The merge then marks/compares where the documents
differ.

I don't think you're going to find any satisfactory method, using Word's
built-in tools, to combine the thirty sets of corrections into one
document and still be able to see all the corrections as "tracked
changes" within that document. Word wasn't designed to function in this
manner.

I'm having some problems with Word 2003's Track and Merge Changes.
Here's the information:

There is an article, approximately 150 pages, with approximately 500
footnotes. Roughly thirty people have verified various parts of the
article, checking format and footnotes. Each reviewer has saved their
changes to their own document. Now, I want to merge these 30-odd files
back into the original. However, problems abound! The most serious is
that once the second file is merged, it starts to reinsert the original
components that were deleted by another reviewer. In addition, the
footnotes start to become deleted. For example, one reviewer will
change footnote 146. When the next document is merged, footnote 146 is
deleted, and the footnote is now found as 147. there is a gap where
146 was. Another document will delete 147, with the footnote now found
at 148.

I've tried merging with and without "Find Formatting" and every
permutation of where and how to merge documents my meager mind can come
up with.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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