This is something that’s been a little confusing in the Microsoft document metadata management market space. From the beginning (since Word 97) we’ve heard that “Word tracks the last 10 authors.” Well… that is just not true. In fact I created a simple VBA routine (see code below) that placed 5000 authors in a Word 2007 document.

Word 2007 could show all the Reviewers under Show Markup and the Reviewing Pane. Word 2003 could not show the Reviewers using the Review toolbar, but it was able to show all 5000 authors in the Reviewing Pane with both DOC and DOCX file formats. [A single reason why the Reviewing Pane should be used more by users.]

Now just how many authors can Word 2007 track? I stopped at 5000 authors. Com’on, who in their right mind would let everyone at Microsoft Corp edit their document with Track Changes turned on? And 5000 authors is completely unrealistic.

In VB, the property type of Activedocument.Revisions.Count is a Long data type (32-bit 4-byte). A 32-bit long data type can hold 2,147,483,647 items. I doubt very much that Word could handle that without blowing up, and this number is moot.

The point here is that Word can track a significant number of authors and you have to ask yourself if the metadata management application your firm depends on can handle that number. iScrub can manage that number.

Here’s the code to test my assumptions:

First create a new blank document, then run the code.

Sub AuthorAdditions()
     Dim x As Long

     Application.ScreenUpdating = False
     ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = True
     For x = 1 To 5000
          Application.UserName = "Author" & Format(x)
          Selection.TypeText Text:="This is more text"
          Selection.TypeParagraph
          ActiveDocument.Save
     Next
     Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub

Last Modified : September 9th, 2009 Filed under : Document Comparison, Free Code Navigate : Previous post / Next post