Why does onscreen text "disappear" when I switch to Final Markup Mode in Track Changes...

Question

really frustrating -- working in word 2008 and every time i switch Tracked Changed screen to Final Showing Markup, large chunks of text just disappears...where does it go?

Help! I know the words are "There" because they switch right back to normal looking in Final mode, but when I show deleted text the format gets nuts-looking.

Answer 1

That's one of the "delights" of working with tracked changes.

With tracked changes on, text is marked as either inserted or deleted or moved while you work.

Depending on how much editing you have done, the result resembles word-salad quite quickly.  The text is not "going anywhere", and that's part of the problem.  It is simply being marked as inserted or deleted or moved.  Your settings in the Tracking tab determine which kinds are visible and which are hidden.

I recommend that you "Accept all changes in document", turn Tracked Changes off, and leave it off.

Tracked Changes makes a document very fragile: you will get lots of crashes and hangs and lose quite a bit of text if you work with Tracked Changes on.  Yes, it is supposed to be reliable.  But "no", it isn't!

If you need to see what changed, keep a copy of the original, and use Compare Documents when you have finished editing.  That will give you the same display, but you won't get the word-salad, the crashes, or the corruptions.

Hope this helps