Hi folks,



Many of my authors have noticed strange behavior in some of their tracked changes documents recently (environment: Office 365 and using collaborative authoring in SharePoint). They're seeing two things:

1. Their tracked changes are now showing as being done by "Microsoft Word" (note, this is NOT the Document Inspector tool changing it to Author).

2. They'll go back in after closing the document and any new changes/comments are showing as coming from a new author completely, even though it says it's the same name as before. Thus, all the comments say they're from "John Smith" but "John Smith" is treated as two (or more) different people.

A web search only got me one hit for this behavior and that was from 2020. The response at the time was, "This is a known issue." Has anyone experienced this before? Is there something I can do to fix it? It's driving my authors crazy, so they're driving ME crazy.

Thanks in advance.

Beej

I don't know but would ask if people are editing the document using a browser version of Word.

If everyone is editing the document ONLY via the installed desktop application I don't have any suggestions.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

To add to what Andrew suggested, I would also look closely at the list of users at Review tab > Tracking group > Show Markup > Specific People. Do you see any inconsistencies there?

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Thanks both. I had checked the Specific People list and their names show twice, but there's been no change to their user names, initials, etc. I can't figure out why Word thinks they're two different people.

As to browser use, we ask them not to edit in that application and I know one of the users affected definitely didn't--he hates browser-based Word as much as I do.

If you look back at the version history, see if you can locate a version where the problem appears for the first time. Who made the edits at that time? Does the problem ever appear for the first time after your version updates or is it only when other individuals edit the file.

Then maybe take a look at that person's machine and perhaps get them to demonstrate how they open and edit files either on the network or when connected via VPN. If you can find some reproducible actions on that machine then you will have a chance of finding the cause of the problems.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia