Word tracks changes in suggestions when reviewing

Question

I am using review mode and making suggestions in my manuscript. Of course, I make mistakes; deletion is necessary. However, when I delete a part of the suggestion, Word tracks that, too. So it tracks changes in the suggestions I haven't accepted yet. I have to manually accept all those extra fixes, which takes more time.

How can I disable this?

The red is the "active" suggestion, the gray is the one that was deleted from the active suggestion.

Answer 1

Not now, as I turned down the author information. But yes, it added specific people on its own. I had a different name set up on my other computer (I changed that to the same now), so it added that, then twice the one I used on my PC, and Microsoft Word (yes, that was there too in specific people). I had to remove them with inspection every other day.

If you usually save your documents in OneDrive, potentially you can avoid the problem by clearing the option to "Always use these values regardless of sign in to Office" at File > Options > General. Doing this would force Word to always use the user name stored in your OneDrive account.

Answer 2

What you are describing should only happen if the deletion and the insertion are attributed to different reviewers/editors.

Rest the mouse pointer on each of the tracked changes and see which editor names display. Note that if you have been editing the document on different computers (different Office installations) and/or using Word on the web, different user names may have been recorded, and those will be treated as completely different users by the Track Changes feature.

Answer 3

Word cannot selectively stop tracking edits made inside an existing suggestion. When Track Changes (or Review mode) is on, every insertion and deletion is tracked until it is accepted or rejected.

To remove the extra “internal” edits, they must be accepted or rejected like any other tracked change:

1. On the Review tab, go to Tracking.
2. Use Accept or Reject to step through each change, or
3. Use the drop-down on Accept or Reject and choose Accept All Changes or Reject All Changes to clear them in bulk.

There is no setting in Word to track only the first version of a suggestion and ignore later edits to that suggestion.

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References:

• Accept tracked changes
• Accept or reject tracked changes in Word
• Track changes in Word