Tidying up tracked changes

Accept Format Changes

Task menu ▸ Word Helpers ▸ Accept Format Changes

A revised document holds two kinds of tracked change mixed together: substantive ones – inserted, deleted, moved – and pure formatting such as "font changed" or "paragraph indented".

The formatting ones rarely matter when reviewing and get in the way. This feature accepts only those and leaves every substantive change standing.

The operation can be aborted with Esc; the add-in then tells you how many changes were accepted before that.

The limitation that counts

If a formatting change was made during an insertion, deletion or move, it belongs to that change and cannot be accepted separately. The add-in points this out explicitly and tells you how many such changes remain.

So more changes are left than you might expect. That is not a fault but the way Word stores changes.

Markup Time Span

Task menu ▸ Word Helpers ▸ Markup Time Span

Works out over what period a document was worked on. You specify:

• User name – leave empty for everyone.
• Earliest date to consider (with a time if you like) – leave empty for no filter.

You get: the users involved, the first and last markup with timestamps, and the span between them in days, hours and minutes.

What the number says – and what it does not

It is the distance between the first and the last change. It is not working time. Somebody who makes one change on Monday and one on Friday shows four days, whatever happened in between.

And: the timestamps come from Word and depend on the system clock of the machine the work was done on. They are not evidence.

If there are no markups – or none for the named user – the add-in says so.