I sent two versions of an edited manuscript to a client, one a marked-up version and the other a cleaned-up version. He has already found two places where accepting the changes to create the cleaned-up version deleted narrative that had not been marked-up for deletion. I tested the process again by creating a new cleaned-up version, and the undesired deletions happened in the exact same places. This seems to be a new feature of Track Changes, and now I don't trust that it will perform as expected. Any ideas about what's going on?



I work on a PC using Office 365, so Word 2016.

Thanks,

Julie Klein

I haven't seen this before and can't think of a reason why it might happen other than possibly a floating text box/table where the anchor is marked for deletion but not the text.

Are you able to supply a copy of the problem areas? If not, try going through the document revision by revision and accept as you go and see if you can spot when the problem occurs.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Hi Andrew

I just tried to copy three paragraphs to illustrate the problem--the exact paragraphs where the problem occurred--and when I pasted, the entire middle paragraph had disappeared, just like happened in the clean-up. (BTW, I know how to transfer a documents with TC to leave the changes intact, so that's not the problem.) In the second instance, a chunk of the paragraph disappeared but not the whole thing.

I also accepted the changes of the suspect paragraph individually, and it worked fine. It only seems to happen with "clustered" accepting of changes.

Incidentally, I've had Word erase all my Track Changes during an update, leaving the Comments intact. Ever since that started happening, I back up every night to an external pin drive. I've had trust issues with Word ever since.

Is it possible that your document is showing markup only from specific people? Check your settings under Review > Show Markup > Specific People

It is possible that there is a corruption in your document. Perhaps you could save to RTF and then reopen that file in Word. That may reveal something previously hidden.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

The client I'm working in only knows how to use the Comments feature, so all the markup is mine. I tried saving to RTF, ran the test again, and the paragraph still disappeared.

Thanks for the suggestion, Andrew.