Hi Ofisteqi,
Sorry if I sounded abrupt. Probably I should have thrown in a smiley or two.
The "big bucks" comment certainly gets a grin here. Believe it or not, I do
this 'cause I like to -- my wife wonders why I "help Bill for free"...
I think there's still some confusion floating around here. The Track Changes
feature is definitely not turned on by default, and neither is the Comments
feature. Both of them need positive action by the user to start putting
stuff into a document.
Once there are both tracked changes and comments in the document, then yes,
it takes a couple of steps to remove them -- or you can run the Hidden-Data
Removal tool. The "Warn before..." setting in Tools Options Security can
help you remember that you have stuff to remove, and I believe you can use
Group Policy to set that option.
Yeah, I remember WordPerfect 5.1 fondly -- but it wasn't all that simple.
Remember the huge wad of printer drivers you had to keep around? Remember
having a plastic strip attached to your keyboard with a 4-level legend of
all the function keys? (Actually, I still have one of those, and I use the
back of it for mainframe access functions. g)
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ:
http://word.mvps.org
Ofisteqi wrote:
Jeez Jay,
You didn't have to personalize your response. If I was a true Office
Techie like you, I would have gotten an MVP certification and the big
bucks that comes with that title. Try not to forget what it was like
when you were learning all this stuff.
As Suzanne stated in her reply, there are multiple settings to
configure because this 'feature' is turned on by default. That's why
this configuration is so confusing, because of the multiple steps
that are required to simply turn it off. I understand why the feature
is available, because in some applications, it would be very useful.
But when you push this software out to 10k desktops, one overlooked
setting like this generates alot of support calls. Those that share
documents with outside vendors want this information striped out for
legal reasons and that's why I asked in the first place. I'm creating
a 'cheat sheet' with instructions and unfortunately, one setting
doesn't remove everything.
Thanks for your prompt replies. It's appreciated.
Ofisteqi wannabe...because I started out in this field with
WordPerfect 5.0 and I miss it's simplicity...sniff.
"Jay Freedman" wrote:
Hi Ofisteqi,
If you never turn on Tracked Changes in the Tools menu for a
particular document, the changes won't be tracked in that document.
That's all there is to that.
If you do turn on Tracked Changes, you must have a purpose in doing
so -- you want someone else (or yourself later on) to see what was
changed. Or you received the document from someone else who intended
that. The feature is primarily for sharing and reviewing information
in a workgroup.
Once you do track changes, they stay in the document until you
remove them. The procedure given in that article isn't complicated.
It boils down to this: "If you want to send a document that has
tracked changes, and you don't want the recipient to see them, then
use the Accept All button on the Reviewing toolbar." As the article
is written, it takes into account the possibilities that (a) the
toolbar might not be visible when you start, (b) some of the options
might have been turned off, and (c) you might want to remove some
changes and not others.
If you're worried about stuff being hidden in Word documents, get the
hidden-data-remover add-in from
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=834427.
This stuff isn't rocket science. For someone who alludes to being an
"Office Techie" it shouldn't even be worth commenting about.
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Ofisteqi wrote:
Is there a way to turn off Tracked Changes without going through the
hoops found in this article?
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/as...983881033.aspx
From what I've read about Tracked Changes, it appears that there is
no way to 'shut off' this information from being hidden in the
document. Of course, there are add-in for converting to .pdf etc,
but why doesn't Word offer a setting (one setting and not confusing
multiple settings stated in this article) to turn this 'feature'
off.
Can anyone explain what the purpose is of having changes tracked
from Microsoft's viewpoint?
With all of the press lately about legal issues and document
retention and storage, there should be a way to shut this down
without attending a training session.
Thanks for your feedback.