Today’s MS Word Mental Health Tip

Here’s a problem that often comes up when several people are working on multiple versions of the same document: how do you copy new text into an existing document and preserve the tracked changes in that new text?

It’s not too hard if the documents are different:

Turn off Track Changes in both documents.
Copy from one document.
Paste in the other document.
Turn Track Changes back on in both documents.

That preserves the change marks correctly in the pasted material.

This works with all or part of the document. For example, I often make
edits to one newsletter article in a different file than the whole
manuscript. After I’m satisfied, I follow the procedure above, selecting
all of the article from one file, then highlighting the original text in
the whole manuscript, then pasting. The result looks as if all the work
were done in the manuscript file.

If the two documents are the same but you want to combine different changes
made in each, use Merge Documents. Open one file, click Merge, select
the other document, then choose Merge into New Document. Look at the
result and decide if the result has combined the changes correctly. If
not, open the second document first, then select the first document, and try
again. It takes a bit of experimenting, so make sure to save copies of
the two original files—it’s far too easy to overwrite.

For more details, consult Hilary Powers’ book Making Word Work for You. Among other useful tips, she warns that the Compare/Merge function is a little…quirky.

Lise Lingo uses Word to track edits in books for the Urban Land Institute, annual reports for the World Bank, and newsletters for AARP.