Recreating a document with comments?

[mrlemmer11]

Hello All,



So, my company has roughly 40,000 documents ( some 1 page, some 100 pages long) all stored on the intranet.

Our team need to go thru all of these documents and obtain certain information from them. So we start by going to the intranet, pulling one form down and opening it.

I have already built a tool that through keystrokes, applies different comments where someone indicates.

After they are done, all the comments and their associations are extracted into excel.

My question is this.... lets say a week later, someone decides they want to review/change some of those comments. How can I recreate that Document with all the comments located in order? Obviously I the user can just save the form with their comments on it... however, as stated above we are talking about 40,000 documents, some 100 pages long already stored on a server somewhere. I don't think it's practical to resave all of these comment-applied documents again and use up all that space.

My idea is to write the .scope / .range / .comments(x) / .author all to a text file. Then when someone wants to recreate the document with the comments on it, they pull down the original document, hit an applyComments macro and wahla. However, I can't figure out how to have the macro/vba understand where to put the comments inside of the document. Order isn't a prob, it's just where in the document is the issue. I thought about searching the documents text for a match to the .range of the comment, however, some of these comments won't have a range... so that won't work.

I thought about bookmarks.... .comments(28) goes immediately after bookmark28... but I run into the same problem... how do the boomarks know where to go?

As i'm writing this, im thinking that I may be able to count the characters in between each comment and build it that way. Since the original document is not allowed to be changed or edited without creating a new file for public release I don't need to worry about a fresh copy of it having its characters change... so maybe something like from start of document to .comment(1) = 309 characters. from .comment(1) to .comment(2) = 48 characters. Then when I write to file each comments attributes, I also save how many characters in between each one, then on a fresh document download, on launch of the macro, it can use that info to populate....I'm kinda thinking that is my best route as of right now.

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So with that, I ask your thoughts on opinions on how I can accomplish this. Confused or need more info? Reply and ask away and I shall answer. Thanks in advance everyone!