Track Changes function thinks I'm two people

Stefan - I assume you're referring to this: 

Q: If Fred's revisions are shown in red on my machine, will they also be red on someone else's machine?

"Maybe, maybe not. Don't rely on any one author's revisions being displayed in a particular colour from day to day, or from machine to machine. Word likes to be creative, and you can't control its creative urges!"

But that's not what's happening with Word 2013. The problem that's been annoying everyone is that the SAME author's revisions can appear simultaneously in two different colors. In the older versions, yes, changes might change color from session to session - but this would be across the board for each author.

My own problem has been resolved (thanks to Jacques), but I've continued to follow this conversation with interest!

And the idea that when a user closes and saves a document, takes a quick break, and reopens the document (all on the same machine, with nobody else having gotten on, and certainly not changing user ID), that person will want to appear as a different color but still as the same user is ridiculous.

Note that this is by design, and it isn't specific to Word 2013. See http://shaunakelly.com/word/sharing/howtrackchangesworks.html.

The answer seems to be that Microsoft doesn't want to be bothered with those of us who have to deal with documents initially created by other users who may not want to update to the latest version of Word. As a copy editor, I find 2007 much easier to use than 2013, but I'm stuck with 2013 at the office. The colors in track change in 2013 are a real nuisance, usually starting with one color and then adding as the next color the one closest to it (turquoise, followed by light blue, for example)--as if the whole point of different colors wasn't to see quickly who made what change, instead of going through several paragraphs before realizing that what appears to be one color is in fact two, and having to go back through the material a second time. And the idea that when a user closes and saves a document, takes a quick break, and reopens the document (all on the same machine, with nobody else having gotten on, and certainly not changing user ID), that person will want to appear as a different color but still as the same user is ridiculous. It doesn't seem as if there's going to be any help for these problems, which take up quite a lot of time and thus cost the user (in my case, my employer) money.

Stefan - I was thrown by the color switches at first, then I got used to them. Did the good people at Microsoft talk to users and conclude that we want to be able to quickly review our most recent changes? Or were they simply seduced by the possibility of introducing some new feature? Change for its own sake?

Good questions, but I have no answers, unfortunately.

The changed behavior isn't necessarily consistent, either.

As a professional computer programmer, I think it is safe to say that simply adding a "space" to the end of a text string and treating it as new userIDs is a "boo-boo", not intentional.  If they really wanted to highlight the most recent changes, they would use the date-time stamp.

And it is probably so low priority that it will probably never be fixed, inspite of all of the complaints we see here about it.  (I hope I am wrong about that guess ... )