Track Changes function thinks I'm two people

Josh

One more question to my list:

Did you try Stefan's suggestion from 2014-12-03 to go to File|Options|General and turn on the "Always use these values regardless of sign in to Office" setting? I can't see from your posts that you mention this, and I assume that you have tried it, but I am just trying to tick off all the options.

Jacques -

Sorry for the delayed response, I was out of the office yesterday. In regard to your other questions:

Are these documents stored on your hard drive, or on a network or SharePoint site?- I receive the documents via email and then save to my hard drive. I never save to a network or any other site.

Also, are you using technology like Microsoft's Active Directory? - I've never heard of that, so I assume not, but I have no idea what that is.

Did you try Stefan's suggestion from 2014-12-03 to go to File|Options|General and turn on the "Always use these values regardless of sign in to Office" setting?- Yes.

I looked back, and the document that I uploaded for you was originally prepared using an earlier version of Word, so it's possible that had something to do with it, but I've also had this problem on documents that were prepared in Word 2013. Anyway, I have not yet had a chance to try to recreate the problems, but as I previously mentioned, there doesn't seem to be a clear cut pattern of when this happen.

Thanks again for your time.

Josh

Hi Josh

I am finding this very intriguing. Of course, you're probably more after a solution than having me satisfy my intellectual curiosity. :-)

Nonetheless, I need some more information from you. But first let me explain what I have. I am working on, and testing, a future update to the same tool I used to fix your file. This update will allow users of Word to accept/reject revisions based on the date of those revisions. I used this new tool of mine to analyse the exact revisions in your document.

The document contains 447 revisions, 379 in the main text, and 68 in the footnotes.

The first revision was dated 2014/09/26  05:01:00 PM with your name as the reviewer.

The last revision using your name was dated 2015/03/20 17:13.

Now what I find interesting is that up to that point, the document had contained three comments, all dated 2014/09/26  05:55:00 PM. How all three comments could have been made at the exact same time, of course, is a mystery, and this anomaly may be our first clue to what is going on here.

Then at 2015/03/20  05:15:00 PM you added another comment (two minutes after the last revision I mentioned above). What is interesting about that is this.

-The comment still uses your name as author.

-However, the comment is listed in the main text story, but not in the comments story (a Word document consists of various "parts," called stories). All of the first three comments are listed in the main text story, and the comments story, as they should be, but this last one not. And it seems to be that which has introduced the error.

Two minutes after that (2015/03/20 17:17) you made another revision, and now suddenly the author was "Josh Kaplan " (with a space).

This continued to 2015/04/22 21:46 (i.e., all revisions were made under this "new" author name).

Then, several days later (2015/05/05  09:54:00 AM) the next revision is listed, and here the revision author name has become "Josh Kaplan [2]".

So the first error was introduced with that comment, and the next one was on a whole separate take on the document.

After than long explanation, more questions:

Did you change anything in between 2015/04/22 and 2015/05/05 in terms of the Word settings?

Also, can you recall what happened when you added that fourth comment (it's on p.54 of the document you provided)?

Slowly, but surely, we are piecing together what has happened....

I confess that I find this very interesting, too. :-)

It is clear that the behavior of Track Changes has changed in Word 2013. For example, I create a new document and add some text which is then marked as "inserted"; then I exit and restart Word, after which further edits to the insertion will be marked in a different color. (It is assumed here that tracking is "By author.") If I exit and reopen the document, all edits will again have one and the same color, tied to my user name.

However, there may be additional things happening in the document(s) we are discussing here.

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?