Hi Guessed,

I have attached a sample document: Sample_tracked.docx.

Background (repeated in short):

For the body text, I use two custom paragraph styles: (1) My_03a_Body_First_para and (2) My_03b_Body_Other_paras.

Both of these styles are based on my custom style My_00_Body_base, which is based on “no style” (to make it independent of the normal template) and “Automatically update” is set to off.

I have also created some character styles (based on “underlying properties.”) that I can apply to the paragraph styles.

Two such styles are (a) My_03e_Body_Italics and (b) My_03f_Body_Thoughts.

In this case, both character styles simply apply italics.

Normally, when I apply the style My_03f_Body_Thoughts, the tracking pane/balloon shows “My_03f_Body_Thoughts.”

If I reject the change, I get back the original text correctly formatted (with the character format removed).

The problem:



Occasionally, I see that the tracking pane/balloon has changed the name of the applied character style to “My_03f_Body_Thoughts, Font: 12 pt, Font color: Text 1.”

Now, in this case when I reject the change, I DO NOT get back the original text correctly formatted to what it was before application of the character style.

The color on the original text changes to green (should be black). Further, sometimes, the font size becomes 8 pt (instead of 12).

When I rest my pointer on the messed up text, the style pane still indicates the correct original paragraph style.

Attached Files

Sample_tracked.docx (56.7 KB, 9 views)

Hi Charles,

You have a fantastic site Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word - A Tutorial in the Intermediate Users Guide to Microsoft Word.

That is where I learned the basics of MS Word styles and much more.

A huge thank-you to you.

Ctrl+Spacebar removes the directly applied character formatting.
Ctrl+Q to removes the directly applied paragraph formatting.

That, however, neither explains nor resolves the problem at hand.

I want to understand the following:
(a) Why does the label/name of the character style change (in the tracked changes balloon)?
(b) Why does “Reject” not give me back what I began with?

And that is not necessarily something I can help with because I seldom use Tracked Changes and never for formatting.

I'm not sure I have a solution to your issue but at least I can see what you are talking about and can offer some observations. To my eye it appears to be a bug that you could ask Microsoft about.

I had a look at the underlying document.xml around specific edits you tracked. The following shows the markup near the words 'dead wrong' text that you tracked a format change on (presumably you were applying a character style to the text). You can see that the Accent 6 colour is requested (which happens to be green in your document) inside the tags that say there is a change. You can also see that the tags for the character style of My03fBodyThoughts is outside the tags for the Change tracking - which is not how I would expect it.
When we choose to reject that tracked change, that colour tag is apparently not being removed and hence you see the text adopt that colour. If you didn't have that colour applied before you made the tracked revision, we can only assume that Word chose to put the tag there when you made the edit.

Could it be that the specific colour tag being applied is due to Word being told to display revisions 'by author' and that Accent 6 is associated with you? Does the same behaviour happen if you change settings in how Revision Tracking is displayed BEFORE you start making revisions.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Okay.

Thank you, Charles.

Hi Guessed,

Thank you for analysing the problem. We at least have some leads on the root cause; however, as Office 2007 is out of support, we cannot approach Microsoft about it.

Here are a few points:

1) The character style that I applied is “My_03f_Body_Thoughts.”

In the style definition, I have used Style based on “underlying properties”, and I have set the colour to Automatic.

2) When the style name does not get modified by change tracking, the “Reject” option gives me back exactly what I started with.

Please look at the file Sample_tracked_2.docx.

I have added one more application of My_03f_Body_Thoughts and the balloon shows the correct name; and I get back the original text exactly when I do a “reject.”

When the style name gets modified, the colour (and sometime the font size) gets changes.

3) I have kept the sample document small, but as you can see, there are several character styles.

I have the same problem with them (no matter what colour I have use in the definition of the character style).

4) In the tracking options, I have not use colour “by author.”

5) “we can only assume that Word chose to put the tag there when you made the edit”

That is the problem. Why is Word doing this?

6) Finally, you wrote:

“Could it be that the specific colour tag being applied is due to Word being told to display revisions 'by author' and that Accent 6 is associated with you?

“Does the same behaviour happen if you change settings in how Revision Tracking is displayed BEFORE you start making revisions.”

If I understand you correctly, it should not matter at all what colours are set using the tracking options.

A “Reject” should do complete a roll-back.

Attached Files

Sample_tracked_2.docx (56.8 KB, 5 views)

An aside, in my opinion, Word 2007 was the worst version of Word since Word 2000, definitely the worst of the ribbon versions. We can only work with what is available, but Word 2010 is far superior. I think 2007 was essentially a beta version that marketing pressed into release. I bought it but uninstalled it from all production machines in my office.

I do not know that this has anything to do with your problem, though.


The subscription version 365 is interesting and has good features but the constant updates can be problems in production capacity. I am on the monthly non-insider update program and usually things get worked out before they reach that release. In a corporate environment, I would probably be on the semi-annual update schedule.

2010 is good and stable but does not have all the bells and whistles.

Well, that is an eye-opener.

Time to move on from Word 2007.

I wonder if this problem has occurred due to some form of corruption.

What could have caused the corruption?

1) The PC had hung once, and I had to reboot. However, as far as I remember, I had not used the recovered files; I had started with the last saved version on the hard disk.

2) Though, the file is not that big (67k words), it has a fairly large number of corrections.

The “Reviewing Pane: gave these statistics:

Summary: 12588 revisions, Insertions 6831, Deletions 5181, Moves 0 Formatting: 240, Comments 336

I have dealt with larger files, though, and I doubt the current problem it due to this factor.

3) This is quite unlikely to cause corruption. I am using a macro to automatically save all open word files (every 20 minutes in the current setting).

4) Browsing through the Internet, I saw suggestions that running Chkdsk could help.

But as the “erroneous formatting” is already in the document, I doubt this would help.

Also, there seem to be some “fixits” available, but I am wary of using them; the last thing I need is for the formatting or change tracking to get messed up.

5) The “word of caution” near the end of this post suggests that the problem is inherent in MS Word.

-----

On another note, I tried to reproduce the same errors on the sample file, but I was unable to do so.

I corrected the problem by
a) rejecting the change (which produced the wrong color and sometimes the wrong size)
b) applying the paragraph style again (with tracking off)
c) reapplying the character style with tracking on.

This correction seems to stick; on closing and opening the file four times, I found the character style name is being correctly displayed in the balloon.

Further, the “reject” option does a complete and correct roll-back.

If this really works, it is going to be a laborious process of finding all these errors and correcting them.

Also, the sample file is really small, and perhaps the scaling up might not work.

Finally, a word of caution: As you can see in the attached file Sample_tracked_4.docx, any changes (overtyping or addition [words or punctuation]) made in a sentence that has already been formatted with a character style leads to that sentence being fragmented in the balloon.

Further, rejecting the changes will only undo the character styling of parts of the sentence.

The only way out of this situation that I could think of is to first reject the character style for each fragment, apply the paragraph style to the whole sentence (which includes the changes), and then reapply the character style.

-----

The bottom line:

I’ll just have to plod my way though all the weird character styling (as indicated by the tracking balloons) and hope the change sticks.

I direct editing of the xml file would require me to know and understand the exact formats, and even with a careful use of Find & Replace, it could produce a bigger mess.

And thank you Charles and Guessed for your inputs and help.

Attached Files

Sample_tracked_4.docx (13.1 KB, 5 views)

Ravindra

I doubt it is corruption caused by a crash. I would think it is just an obscure bug in Word caused by the need to turn on and off large numbers of tags when tracked revisions overlap. The rules of xml mean that that partial overlaps of tagged areas are not allowed so when you do this with your tracked revisions, there is a mass of open/close tags that need to be added in the background file structure to deal with it.

I don't think you have helped the situation by the complexity of what you are doing with your document. To avoid problems, I always strive to make document formatting 'as simple as possible'.

In terms of styles, the simplest possible document would only use built-in styles. There are already over 250 styles that are built-in and you can't remove them (although you can hide them) so if you start by adding custom styles you are immediately making the document more complex than it needs to be. I don't mind a few custom styles but in I believe you should always use a built-in style that already exists before going to custom styles.

In terms of tracking revisions - this adds complexity to the document and as you have demonstrated, is buggy. There is a ceiling on how many revisions are WORTH tracking. Most changes you make to a file are obvious and don't need to be reviewed and therefore SHOULDN'T be tracked.

The point of revision tracking is so that you can draw someone else's eyes to a change you are recommending. I would put it to you that having a file with over 12,000 tracked revisions is pointless. No-one is going to pay attention to that level of detail and you drastically reduce the effectiveness of a review if you ask someone to reject/accept your revisions on a document like that. What ends up happening is the reviewer pays attention to the first 50 or so, then gets bored and either accepts all or just asks the author to give them a clean copy. If your document has excessive tracked revisions you lose the opportunity for the reviewer to add REAL VALUE to the document. By asking them to review the MEANINGFUL tracked revisions and not the low value ones, you get a proper value-adding review of your edits.

When I edit a document to be reviewed by others, I make sure the Status Bar shows revision tracking and therefore I can easily turn tracking on/off according to whether the reviewer needs to actually review the change vs a change that is already agreed. Every edit I make, I make a decision on whether this is something that other people HAVE TO review vs an obvious change not open for debate. Assuming you have a style guide that specifies character styles on verbal quotes and book titles, those edits would definitely fall into the 'already agreed as preferred formatting' category and therefore wouldn't be tracked.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Hi Guessed,

Thank you for your input.

First, I do not show all changes or the reviewer would go nuts (even in the manuscripts that are in good condition).

Second, I always send two files: one with all tracking and comments, the other with changes accepted but essential comments (that need to be addressed) remaining. The reviewer needs to look at the tracked file only in case of doubt.

Third, this is the weirdest document I have had to look at; it is chock-full of comma splices, run-ons, short sentences, and fragments that can be fixed in multiple ways.

Plus, the work is rather creative in terms of font sizes (mixed up) and hundreds of movie, album, book names etc. I keep different styles for simple italics (for names of books, movies, etc.), thoughts, messages, etc. so that changes can be made globally instantly to each category (as has happened more than once).

Also, during copyediting, I use different colors for different types of italicized text. This helps me keep track of the different functions. And really, it is not the number of styles but the number of application of the character styles that seem to create the problem.

Note that almost all of the text is set using just two paragraph styles.

Finally, I refrain very strongly from direct formatting; every word in the document should be based on a style. And I do not let any style be based on the normal template; that can cause problems, as you well know.

Getting to the possible cause of the problem: “I would think it is just an obscure bug in Word caused by the need to turn on and off large numbers of tags when tracked revisions overlap.”

I wrote in my previous message:

“Finally, a word of caution: As you can see in the attached file Sample_tracked_4.docx, any changes (overtyping or addition [words or punctuation]) made in a sentence that has already been formatted with a character style leads to that sentence being fragmented in the balloon.

“Further, rejecting the changes will only undo the character styling of parts of the sentence.

“The only way out of this situation that I could think of is to first reject the character style for each fragment, apply the paragraph style to the whole sentence (which includes the changes), and then reapply the character style.”

This does not have to do with the number of custom styles in the file; not even on the number of different character styles in a single sentence,

A sentence with just ONE single character style gets messed up if any editing is done to the part on which the character style has been applied.

Cheers!

Ah! I seem to have messed up. I hadn’t paid attention to your signature.

I presume you are Andrew.

If so, your LinkedIn profile is truly amazing.

As far as I can tell, you are using Revision tracking, Paragraph and Character styles in the way they were intended. But the industrial scale you are applying the revision tracking is perhaps pushing it harder than it likes. Your tracked formatting bubbles say that there is a character style applied AND the colour set to Text 1. This does imply that rejecting that tracked revision will change the colour in some way - do you ever notice that applying the character style while tracking shows a bubble with two tracked changes rather than the one that you made.

I don't think you have messed up and there is nothing special in my LinkedIn profile that would give me any more seniority or insight than you have demonstrated. Your document styles and eloquence here demonstrate you have a high level of understanding and proficiency in using Word and styles. But I would say you are pushing aspects of the software in ways that the programmers who made it didn't consider deeply enough.

I don't know that there is a simple fix to resolve the tracked revisions bug you have discovered but there are benefits if you can continue to evolve your templates and work practices to keep things at the 'complex enough' level but still avoiding complexity wherever you can reasonably do so.

Microsoft Word's implementation of styles is flawed. They made an early design decision to allow a paragraph style to be applied to a part of a paragraph. That bad decision then forced them into a series of bad design/implementation decisions (Linked 'para/char' styles, character styles not overlapping etc) and resulted in things like the Char Char styles bug that tortured users for many years.

Setting up style chains like My_03b_Body_Other_paras based on My_00_Body_base based on Normal achieves nothing more than adding complexity for complexities sake. It forces you in to doing more work than you need to when adding content for no realistic gain. It also creates nooks and crannies in the document structure where bugs like the one you have discovered can hide. Was that the cause of your issue - probably not - but where you can avoid complexity, IMO, you should.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thank you for your insights, Andrew.

Just a few points though:

1) My My_03b_Body_Other_paras is based on My_00_Body_base which in turn is based on “no style.”

Is that the same as “My_03b_Body_Other_paras based on My_00_Body_base based on Normal”?

2) I have used hierarchical style definition so that I can control the formatting of the entire document by tweaking one single style: My_00_Body_base. And this works very well.

Finally, you have written “Microsoft Word's implementation of styles is flawed.”

Does that I mean upgrading MS Office will not help resolve this problem?

I have not seen significant change in the implementation of styles but any change up or down from Word 2007 is likely to be a general improvement in your experience with Word. Both Word 2003 and 2010 were superior 2010 is ten years old.