Marking Changes to text

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ISO 9000 series of Quality Assurance Standards require that the nature of changes to documents be indicated.
This is required so the recipient of the document can quickly identify the change.
Word Perfect made this easy as you could select the text and then redline it which placed a character in the margin.
Words track changes is not appropriate as it marks all changes even if a blank is inserted, the user of the document only needs the significant changes marked. ie. the writer needs to be able to select the text to be marked.
I don’t want to use methods like changing the font or highlighting as this makes the document messy.
I am using Word97
Does anyone out there have a simple solution or perhaps a macro for this.

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Here’s a very handy macro for marking selected text as track change Inserted:

Sub MarkSelectionAsInserted()
    ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = False
    Selection.Cut
    ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = True
    Selection.Paste
    ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = False
End Sub

You can assign this to a button on a toolbar for quick access.

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you can do a number of things, none of them really great. You can put a right-border on a paragraph, which will show up as a vertical marker. Too bad if you want it on the outside of duplex stuff. You can put almost anything into a text box in the margin. As you note, Word will do it automatically, with problems. If you Accept Changes you might be able to choose which will remain as changes; i haven’t tried this in this way. Experiment.

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Well, track changes was made for what you want to do… but I understand about not caring about spaces and the like. You may consider using Insert>Comment. This will place a tag in the text of the document (it doesn’t have to show highlighted) Then when you show comments you can just scroll through as if they were footnotes…
hope this helps!
have fun

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I’ve set up a toolbar button for myself to be able to quickly toggle track changes on and off (using the command “Track Changes”).

Then, as I enter or paste in text, I can toggle TrackChanges on or off as desired.

A bit ham fisted, but it works.

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Dale

You don’t need the button. Double click the TRK in the status bar on the bottom of your screen to turn on/off tracking.

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Thanks, Andrew. I’ve always have my status bar turned off, to get more text on the screen at one time. Maybe I should rethink that.

Is there any way of controlling what’s displayed on the status bar? (I suspect not, as it doesn’t seem to be an object in Visual Basic.)

Any ideas?

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An alternative might be to assign a key combination to turn track changes on and off.

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FWIW, you may want to try a third-party application. I would suggest DeltaView by WorkShare Technology. You can visit their site at http://www.workshare.net and download a fully-functional trial version. Then decide if it’s what you need. I do not suggestion Lexis’ CompareRite — it is quite finicky about documents, particularly those containing tables; and they have no intention of improving or upgrading to accommodate O2K.

Good luck!

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