January 18, 2005

Die MS Word Die!

So, I found a very strange bug in MS word today, but I've got no idea how to reproduce it with out the 1 document I've been copying pasting from.

It seems that if you copy something from a document that had track changes running on it into another document that you have track changes enabled for, you can actually get it to paste stuff that had been deleted or changed. Since I was copying and pasting a lot of stuff from one file to the other, this sucks.

Here's an (ficitonal) example of what I made happen:
I've got document X that's been edited by people A, B and C.

Theres a line of Text in it which was like this in one of the drafts:
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cat dog."

Say person B changed it to something that made more sense by deleting cat, leaving you with:
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. ---then word adds that cat was deleted by person B.

Person C finishes editing document X, turns off track changes, and saves it.

Now Person D (that's me) needs to take information out of document X to create document Z. If I've got track changes turned on in the document Z, and paste the line "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." which I copied out of document X. This is what I get:

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cat dog." Cat magically reappears.
If I turn off track changes and paste the same line I get:
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." Which is what I really wanted to paste in the first place.

Apparently it only works with different authors, since I can't force it to work with something I change and edit myself.

Now I have to go back and actually read all the stuff i was copying and pasting to make sure the right thing actually was put in there. ARGH!

Posted by Cynan at January 18, 2005 01:35 PM
Comments

WTB a secretary!

Posted by: at January 19, 2005 06:20 AM
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