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Solve : Going nuts with MS Word Tracking? |
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Answer» ???I'm going mildly insane out here! I'm a writer/photographer, which is only important to know because my issue is related to this work. I have recently switched to MS Office 365 and am now using MS Skydrive. I have a 350page document that is ready to be sent out. However - and this is where I'm going nuts - for some unknown reason (unknown to me) MS Word has place the entire document into tracking. I have shut off tracking, I have deselected every tracking option and have tried every other suggestion posted on MS own website for this issue. Nothing works! I can hide the tracking on my own system, but when I copy/paste or simply send the document the tracking reappears and I cannot rid the document of the tracking. Over the course of time, I have moved entire blocks of narrative around the document and have replaced other sections, so there are a ton of tracking marks within the document, so much so that each page is covered with marks in various colors. I have done everything that MS suggests to remove these marks from the document and yet, they remain. I have a 350page document that is ready to be sent out.Have you considered breaking it into smaller blocks? MS word may have an internal problem with a large document that is not well known. (A variation of Morphy's law, If they don't know, it will happen.) You say "ready to be sent out/" Does that mean it is to be printed or bound as a handbook? What format does the company want? I understand that when you export a Word document, the tracking does no show in the output. Have you tried exporting the document is other formats? PDF is a popular format for transporting documents for one platform ton another. The program below I have not used. STILL, it might be suitable Convert Word to PDF (Microsoft Office Word documents to PDF) I hope this is of some help.Thank you, very much, for your response. I should have made this clearer: I'm attempting to upload approximately 15 pages as part of an e-mail to an agent. (body of the e-mail, not an attachment) The entire document is 350 pages, but right now I only need to upload the first 15 pages. Agents require everything to be in Word not as a PDF. When I upload the section I want to send, it uploads with all the tracking marks including loads of red/green CROSSED out sections and other marks. What I don't get is that I deliberately turned tracking off and yet, for some unknown reason, Word apparently automatically turns tracking on when you USE Skydrive. I discovered how to remove tracking marks page-by-page, but for such a long document this will be a complete nightmare. The other concern is that as soon as I remove the marks, if I upload to Skydrive, I'm sure the marks will be added again. I'm getting to despise both Word and Skydrive! Anyway, thanks again for your suggestions, ordinarily I would put the document into a PDF, but, alas, I have to do what the agents want. From a quick search it seems that tracking is lost if the file format is not the current form of .DOC used by newer versions of MS Ward. Especially when .RTF or some other older format form is used. But the RTF can preserve most, by not features. After conversion to RTF you can exit word, rename the new file, and read it into MS Word. The tracking should be gone. You can taken save it as a new MS word document with a different name. I have not done this,with tracking but this has worked for other odd issues found with MS Word. It's docx now...Quote from: patio on May 20, 2013, 12:03:18 PM It's docx now...Thanks Pario. There is a lot of stuff about how to reduce the size of DOCX files that have tracking. One post said you could make the file into a ZIP, then peek in the ZIP folder and then see the additional files that are part of the new DOCX scheme. One could edit the ZIP to remove the unwanted files and the extra stuff will vanish into the cyber black hole.Thank you, all of you, for your help! I've learned one important lesson: NEVER ever create a long document in Word! Instead, keep everything in smaller, more manageable files. After a lot of messing around, I finally figured out how to remove at least some of the tracking. I opened the tracking dialogue menu, selected "show markup" and then went markup by markup to either accept or reject each markup. This only took me hours of work (Grrrrrrrrr) but it did work, sort of. I then divided the document into smaller pieces and ran the "Inspect Document" utility to identify and remove all remaining markups. Finally, I saved the document by sections and now it has no markups. It's been a royal PIA! The part I don't understand is why Word automatically adds tracking whenever you upload to Skydrive. I kept trying to find something within Skydrive where you have the option of either selecting or deselecting tracking, but found nothing. I suppose this is because many people use Skydrive to collaborate on projects. I do this with my clients, but for whatever reason, I haven't had this tracking problem before. Of-course, perhaps this has something to do with using Office 360 on the laptop and Office 2010 on the desktop - although why this would cause the problem isn't clear to me. Regardless, I do appreciate your help very much - Irene |
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