Since the inception of Microsoft Word for Windows (15+ years!), Track Changes has been analogous to scratching a chalkboard with your fingernails (now that’s an old analogy) or using a felt pin as a whiteboard marker. Most trainers (back in the day) and even some industry pundits (who taught and wrote about best practices for Word) told users not to use them. I never understood that, because from the very first I saw Track Changes as an incredible collaborative benefit to the legal market… then as now… “I was just a loose noisy cannon”.

Around 1999 we (Esquire Innovations, Inc.) began working on iRedline, which I envisioned as a Microsoft Word Comparison tool that would take Microsoft’s built-in features, such as Tracked Changes to completely new level. Moreover, it has taken a very long time for the market to “get it”, and now iRedline is being treated as a new comer to comparison market, because it enhances Tracked Changes so significantly, and now everyone (well almost everyone) loves Word’s Tracked Changes.

I believe this “track change” negativity stemmed from two misunderstood ideas. First, tracked changes were “bad”, because it contained metadata. This concerned was easily taken care back in Microsoft Word 97 (SR2 ’99) with the “Remove Personal Information setting” and metadata management products that came out around 1999, such as Esquire’s iScrub and Paine Consulting’s Metadata Assistant.

Second, Track Changes are inaccurate and easily corrupted the document. If tracked changes were turned on during the editing process, Tracked Changes were EXTREMELY accurate. As far as corrupting a document, I believe that rumor was started by vendors who wanted to sell “fix the document” products, when the problem was really too much direct formatting, 1000-year-old documents converted to Microsoft Word and not using styles as a best practice.

Stay tuned in… over the next several weeks I will showing you how to use Tracked Changes and how iRedline enhances the whole process.

Last Modified : August 19th, 2009 Filed under : Document Comparison, General, Metadata Navigate : Previous post / Next post