This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
I am a copyeditor, which means I use the track changes function all the time. Since I switched to Word 2013 I've had a problem with some documents whereby after I close the document and open it again, the track changes function treats me as a new user. The problem with this is that I often go over any given bit of text several times, potentially making new changes each time, and when the system treats me as a new user, any earlier additions that I later delete show up in the margin as deleted text (rather than simply disappearing). This is confusing for my clients, who only want to see my final changes and not the history of my train of thought. Of course, I can resolve the problem by rejecting the change instead of deleting the added text, but (a) I don't always remember to do that, and (b) this is still awkward, especially where I rewrite a given bit of text several times, making new additions and deletions each time. Can anyone advise as to how I can alert the system that when I return to a document, it should treat previous tracked changes as still active? I know there must be a way to do this because the problem only arises with some documents. I suppose there is something about the settings in the original document as it is sent to me that affects this, but for the life of me I can't figure out what that is. Thanks to anyone who can help!
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Jacques, I've created a sample document and uploaded it to Dropbox. You can find it here -
https://www.dropbox.com/s/605lvnrc64h7r76/Track%20changes%20problem%20sample%20doc-MBG.doc?dl=0
If you can figure out what's going on you'll make a number of people very happy!! Good luck. :)
Jacques - Thanks for the response and the offer to help. I don't have a good example that I could share publicly right now (because of issues with confidential information in the documents), but I will see if I can recreate the problems on a document that I am able to share. Thanks.
Josh
Josh, what I did was delete all the text in a document that was giving me problems and then paste in some meaningless text. The underlying document is the one I worked with but the original text is gone, so confidentiality isn't an issue.
Meira
I spoke too soon. Here's a portion of a doc that I had been working on that illustrates the problem. This is a document that I was editing - I did not create the document. I haven't noticed a problem with documents that I created myself. When I open this document I see myself listed as 3 different reviewers, with three different colors for the edits (not counting the separate color for moved text).
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xzae4ysal68ofs6/Kapy3%20test%20doc.docx?dl=0
MBen-Gad - when I open your document I only see one reviewer, but I've had the same problem that you describe in your doc.
It's curious that for some of us the document retains different colors for different editing rounds (kapy3) and for others all rounds end up the same color after saving (me). Maybe this will help Jacques solve the problem by allowing him to eliminate some possible causes. Or maybe we have two totally different things going on with the same effect.