I open the Word doc. Go to Tools menu --> Track Changes --> Highlight changes. Uncleck all check boxes. OK. Save document. Close document. Reopen document. There are all the #%^$## change-balloons off to the right.
Click for click and keystroke for keystroke, for the Complete Idiot®, a person who doesn’t tend to use Word voluntarily: can you explain how to make it so that the tracking of changes is completely and utterly nuked for this fucking document?
I may wish to invoke “Track Changes” again in the future. If so, I’d like it to only track changes that occur subsequent to that point.
I have the vague idea that somewhere I had once seen an “accept all changes” dialog. Is that relevant? If so, I have unchanged the changes I did not like already, so I think it would be safe to “accept all changes”… but I don’t remember where I saw that dialog. This is Word. There are probably dialogs that say “Would you care to call a plumber to fix your kitchen sink?”. I can’t find shit in this godforsaken application.
I meant more the comment bubbles that don’t change the text, yeah manually approving all minor formatting changes would be madness.
In Word 2011, it looks like it’s the “Review” tab, “Changes” section, and then an image of a paper and a pencil with a green check that says “Accept”. If you click the little arrow beside that, choose “Accept All Changes in Document.” I can’t imagine it changed much in newer versions, I’m not sure about pre-ribbon versions.
Found it. Accepting all changes didn’t dismiss the comments, so, yeah, I had to deal with those one at a time. Fortunately there were only 81 of those.
MS Word won’t accept changes in the background. I tried clicking “Accept all changes” and then working in another application while it cranked away on them, but nope, it stopped making progress and I had to re-click “Accept all changes”. 7234 changes in total, yeesh. Thanks for your help.
MORE Word weirdness: I decided to check the word count to see how much it had changed since the last round of edits. Previous total was about 96,700. The manuscript is busted into chunks (“part one”, “part two” etc) so I opened each in Word and brought up Word Count and jotted the result down in my spreadsheet. “Hmm, that’s odd, they’re all down quite a bit”. Yeah, good editing can sometimes cut out some bloat, but there weren’t many cuts this time and one new scene was added so I was expecting growth instead of shrinkage. And it was way smaller: 77,809 words.
Puzzled, I opened the previous copy of the manuscript files. It had been Microsoft Word that had originally informed me that the word count was 96K-and-change. Same files, same version of Microsoft Word (unless it updated itself without my consent when I wasn’t watching or something), only the OS has been updated. But now for the old version of the manuscript it reports 78,311 words. WTF?
I do a Save As of part one and save as plain text. Then open in TextWrangler.
Word says: 28431
Word used to say: 35163
TextWrangler says: 35293
Going back to the current version, I do a Save As / plain text, then open in TextWrangler for word count. Total them up. Result: 97,469
One of the tricks to get rid of all the crap Word accumulates was to save the file as rtf file, then reopen it in word. Of course, that is not an option if you have a lot of embedded images and tables, but for a file that contains mostly text it is worth a try.