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Why, what changes did I make?

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"Do you want to save the changes you made to 'List of people I've kissed.doc' before closing?"

An innocent question, but what do I do if I don't remember what changes I've made? I'd say yes but what if I deleted a whole section yesterday in order to make an excerpt, and by saying Yes I'm really deleting half my document? On the other hand, should I really click No? What if I corrected the spelling of one word but have forgotten about it?

Were any changes, in fact, made at all, or am I being asked simply because the computer has updated the current date in a dynamic field in the document?

I'd like this ubiquitous dialog box to have another option besides Yes, No, and Cancel: Show Me Changes. I don't need to see the entire history of insertions and deletions (that would be much too memory-intensive). Just arrows pointing to words or regions in the text where editing was done, with the ability to jump to the previous arrow/next arrow using a little toolbar.

I'd like this for spreadsheets, too.

Frequent users of Track Changes may be spared this problem, but leaving that on all the time is memory- and space-intensive and not pretty to look at on the screen.

P.S. I'm sure Linux or Mac has had this feature since the first computer was invented, but at least I don't think it's common.

phundug, Apr 18 2007

Shauna Kelly's Track Changes FAQ http://www.shaunake...ckChangesWorks.html
For those unfamiliar with this MS Word feature. [jutta, Apr 18 2007]


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Annotation:







       A real problem, a simple solution, a fake bun.
Germanicus, Apr 18 2007
  

       Track changes isn't a universal catch-all, either. I encroissant this idea, thusly +
calum, Apr 18 2007
  

       It may be a little unwieldy at times, but I would love to have this option, and at times would have killed for it.
normzone, Apr 18 2007
  

       Beats the hell out of saving 89 versions of the same file just to make sure you didn't screw something up. [+]
nuclear hobo, Apr 18 2007
  

       Some BMS supervisory programs that I use have an Audit Log feature whereby the station saves all user actions to a database. if you archive this database you can get a record of all actions. I managed to tell the customer why he couldn't log an electrical meter before 11th April 2006 because I saw the site engineer add and set the log to archive at that time. I guess you could write something similar provided you were happy to be running a largish database service on your PC/Network
gnomethang, Apr 18 2007
  

       So... how many people have you kissed?   

       It should also apply to other programs such as image editors and such, but instead of arrows it could possibly highlight the changed pixels or something.
BJS, Apr 18 2007
  

       How much did I drink last night?? Why was I editing this list?? Why is "my ass" on this list?? Should I save???
MoreCowbell, Apr 19 2007
  

       If you've got several things on the go at once the 'do you want to save changes' question can result in an agony of indecision.

MS Word's 'Track Changes' keeps track of all changes made to the document but I think what we are talking about here is something that only keeps a log of changes since the last time the document was saved. This would be a very useful and bunworthy feature I feel.
DrBob, Apr 19 2007
  

       Very practical and nice; I especially sympathise with your predicament of changing dynamic dates.   

       I do fear, however, that small changes (punctuation etc.) might be hard to spot when shown an overview of the whole document.
dbmag9, Dec 31 2007
  


 

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