Having trouble with others seeing previous changes to a document 2

[RichardPrewitt]

I am having trouble with changes that I make, like omitions and strike throughs being viewable when others open the document. How do I make these changes unviewable to others?

 

[TonyJollans]

Hi Richard,

Take a look at the options under [blue]Tools > Track Changes[/blue], but be aware that suppressing the display does not necessarily remove the information from the document.

There are others here who can give you better information, but there have been well-publicised cases of corporate documents being unwittingly released into the wild with change history embedded in them.

Enjoy,
Tony

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[RichardPrewitt]

Thanks, this is the very reason that I want to know. The problem is that the CEO of the company that I work for has made changes to legal documents but when he sends them to his lawyer, the previous changes are still viewable. Im a network assistant admin and vb programmer, and I have not ran across this problem before but have seen numerous cases including a couple from Microsoft where their documents made the news. I will try this out but because they are legal documents, I cannot try it out on the actual documents that are having the problem.

Thanks

 

[fredericofonseca]

In order to avoid that problem you have

Option 1 - Only send PDF versions of the document, never the document itself. (preferred way)

Option 2 - Always do a Accept All Changes before sending the document away.

Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

 

[RichardPrewitt]

Thanks,

I went ahead and went the PDF route. I bought Adobe 6.0 Pro and had his secretary try using that and it works fine.

Thanks again

 

[fredericofonseca]

Buying Adobe is a waste of money.

see

http://www.pdfprinter.com

for several other options, some of them free.



Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

 

[fumei]

You could also put in the Document_Open event:

With ActiveDocument
.TrackRevisions = False
.ShowRevisions = False
End With

However, a lot depends on whether you WANT to see revisions before it is sent out. It also depends on whether you are using a template or not. You could lock up the template and have code that literally rewrites the viewers ability to track changes (turning it back on again upon closing your document). It is possible.

It would not be total protection from seeing what revisions may have been made. But you would have to put in some real effort to get at it. You certainly could set it up that the only way would be reasonably serious VBA.

You could also copy the entire CURRENT text document into a new file before sending.


Gerry

 

[macropod]

For some people, buying Adobe Acrobat might be a waste of money. For example, if you only want to print to PDF.

If you want a fully-functional pdf, though, a mere pdf printer driver is completely inadequate.

Cheers

 

[RichardPrewitt]

Thanks to all that replied with helpful information and suggestions. Although I am very well versed in VB and would love to write scripts for the documents, I need to keep it simple becuase of the PC literacy of the end-users themselves. Keeping in mind that I recieve calls on a weekly basis on such things as "How do I scan this picture" to "I cant attach this picture to my e-mail" and the oh so famous "I cant sign on (Um caps lock or num lock)" So I was looking for a simple solution and seeing that writing VB scripts for all of the companies templates would be more trouble than its worth, buying a full version of Acrobat so they could create PDF's seemed like the more logical solution for protecting the sensitive documents.

Thanks to all again for your time and help,
Richard