# MS Word Track Changes/Comments problems



## kittenpie (Apr 7, 2007)

Two weird problems going on with reviewing features in Word:

1) When making Comments, each comment shows the person's name who made the comment, and the date and time it was made: "Jane Doe 4/7/07 1:40pm". After saving the document, however, it changes to "Author 4/7/07 1:40pm". This is happening on both a PC and a Mac, not sure which version of Word. What's going on here? I've never seen this happen before.

2) Same document as with the above problem. The document has paragraph numbers. When saving the document, the paragraph numbers "change" -- that is, Word shows (via Track Changes) that a change has been made to the formatting of the numbers, and that the number itself has been deleted and replaced. But the replacement number is EXACTLY THE SAME as the original number. Huh???!?

Any help with either of the above would be appreciated!!


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## qrose57 (Jun 20, 2008)

We just started a SharePoint site and are having the same issue.

Did you ever figure out what was causing this?

thank you, 

Anne


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## kittenpie (Apr 7, 2007)

Sadly, no! We never did figure out what the heck was going on, we've just been living with the fact that you can't tell who made the changes. We did figure out a workaround for the paragraph-numbering changes: if you catch it right away, you can just CTRL-Z (undo) to get rid of it. If you don't catch it right away, you can laboriously accept or reject the change (doesn't matter which, since the numbers are the same anyway). Wish I had more insight to offer!


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## qrose57 (Jun 20, 2008)

I mentioned this to one of our help desk staff and he had the answer. He said it took him a long time to find. It has to do with a setting in Word.

To start, go the the Office Button and select Word Options at the bottom of the screen. Then click on Trust Center on the left side of the Window.

Here are his instructions, minus the screen prints. I could not figure out how to quickly attach them.

REMOVE PERSONAL INFORMATION FROM FILE PROPERTIES ON SAVE

There have been recent incidents where a reviewer has used Track Changes to make edits to a document and when they save the document, their personal information is removed and their edits revert to Author. This is caused, on a by document basis, by the use of the Prepare / Inspect process to finalize a document. When you run this process, it activates a setting in the Trust Center of Word that removes personal information from the file properties when you save from that point forward. This setting can be turned off manually.

I would suggest that after you use the Prepare / Inspect process, you go back into the Trust Center and de-activate the Remove Personal Information setting. The following steps will guide you to the location of that setting.

Click on the Office Button in the upper left corner of your screen.

Click on the Word Options at the bottom of the drop down window.

Click on Trust Center on the left side of the window.

Click on the Trust Center Settings in the lower right corner of the window.

Click on Privacy Options on the left side of the screen.

Under Document-Specific settings, uncheck the box next to Remove personal information from the file properties on save.

Click Ok to close this window and Ok again to close the final window.

By doing this, if any further changes are made, they will show up as changes by the reviewer and not default to the Author.


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## kittenpie (Apr 7, 2007)

Wow, thanks! That's super helpful!


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## jimr381 (Jul 20, 2007)

Good catch. I was going to suggest the same when I saw that it was wiping out the user information. In 2003 you go to "Tools">"Options">>"Security" tab from the menu bar and there will be an option that you can turn on or off via a checkbox called "Remove Personal information from file on save."

I figured out why I missed this post, I started after you had posted it. 


Could you please mark the post as solved via the "Mark Solved" button at the top of the post?


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