Changes not saving (Word 2003)

[Linda]

A client of mine (Person A) is reporting that he created a document in Word 2003 that he sent to Person B, who also has Word 2003. She edited the document and saved the changes, but the changes did not save (there were no error messages or indications that the changes did not save). She sent the file back to Person A , who made the changes that previously didn't stick and sent the file to Person C. Person C could not see the changes. Person A then sent the file to me (I have Word 2000), and I could see the changes just fine.

The specific changes Person A asked me to look at happen to be in a footnote.

Can someone give me a few clues as to how to troubleshoot this? The document Person A created was done with the assistance of a macro I wrote for him, but the macro essentially assembles some documents into one. The document consists of some tables, each one in its own section. I can't imagine that the macro has anything to do with the saving issue, but I'd sure like to resolve this. The macro does not save the document, by the way; the user saves it "manually."

Thanks for any clues you can give me!!!

- Linda

[HansV]

From what you describe, I would say that the changes ARE being saved, since you can see them. The problem is that Person B and Person C don't see them. Could it be that the document has been edited with Track Changes on, and that the recipient has the display of tracked changes turned off? This can be controlled by the settings on the Reviewing toolbar.

[Linda]

If Track Changes were turned on, would I be able to see that setting in the file? "Track changes while editing" is turned off in the file they sent me, but I don't know if that setting is specific to the file or my Word setup.

If we were to open the file in Notebook or WordPad, would that be a good clue as to whether the changes were saved to determine if it's a matter of Word's not displaying the changes?

Thanks for your help, Hans!

- Linda

[HansV]

You can try opening the document while selecting "Recover text from any file" in the "Files of type" dropdown list.
Don't forget to set "Files of type" to "All Word documents" next time you open a document!

[jscher2000]

> "Track changes while editing" is turned off in the file they sent me, but I don't know if that setting is specific to the file or my Word setup.

This is a setting that is saved with the file, at least in my experience.

Did Person B open the document directly from email? In that case, they may be editing a copy in Outlook/Internet Explorer's cache. This is dangerous because if you close the email before saving and closing the document, or you save and close the document but don't tell Outlook to save the changes to the email, they might be discarded or become inaccessible or overwritten. It always is safer to save the file to a "real" folder (such as c:myworkingfile), edit there, and attach to the reply from there.

Not sure what's up with Person C.

[Linda]

I just wanted to put some closure on this and thank you for the help.

I'm getting my info third-hand, so it's difficult. Track changes did not appear to be the issue. The client assured me they were saving the file to the disk as opposed to opening the attachment from e-mail, so supposedly that was not the issue.

That was all the information I could get out of them. However, subsequent documents they worked on did not seem to be a problem, so I'm not going to worry about it unless it becomes an issue again. I had just presented the client with a new macro that he was going to evaluate, so the saving issue put a black cloud over my efforts. Thanks for saving me with your excellent suggestions!

- Linda