Change Tracking

Question

Given a .doc and .docx file, can I determine if change tracking was turned on when the documents were saved without loading the file in Word?

Answer 1

If Track Changes was active when the document was saved, the settings.xml file will contain

<w:trackRevisions/>

While you can probably use VBA to unzip the file and access the settings.xml file and search for that entry, it would be a lot easier to just use vba to open the document and determine if Document.TrackRevisions is True or False

See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/word.document.trackrevisions?f1url=%3FappId%3DDev11IDEF1%26l%3Den-US%26k%3Dk(vbawd10.chm158007610);k(TargetFrameworkMoniker-Office.Version%3Dv16)%26rd%3Dtrue

Answer 2

Hi @Stephen Gross ,
You don't want to open the source document, is my understanding right?
In my opinion, you can copy the document and open the copy file to check if the feature is enabled.
If my understanding is incorrect, pleae provide more information about your problem. I'm glad to help you.

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Answer 3

At a guess, you should be able to look at the underling XML and find out if tracking is enabled.