office-collab — archive

[Dennis Hamilton]

That's no urban legend. OpenOffice-lineage Writer and Microsoft Word all allow change-tracking to be toggled on and off without problems. (Toggling in Calc is destructive of the already-tracked changes. I don't know if that is the case for Excel.) In ODF Text documents, the <text:tracked-changes> text:track-changes setting is carried into the persistent document. I have edited documents where change-tracking was toggled off and then back on so I could correct something the software did that was not something that needed to be tracked. I have done this, for example, when producing change-tracked documents that reflect the application of Errata. If I add Editorial Notes to a document, I don't add them as tracked changes. With OpenOffice-lineage software I have to toggle sometimes because change-tracking gets something wrong (such as making unintended font changes or treating fonts as changed when they aren't, etc.) I also do it to handle changes to the embedded schema to ensure that the line-numbering is adjusted properly. LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice have a feature (going back at least to OpenOffice.org 3.4-dev) by which one can protect the change-tracking setting. That is, it cannot be toggled without a password. This is handled in settings.xml, along with the provision to protect a complete document as read-only. The feature is on the Writer File Properties Security (bad name!) tab. But, by default, there is no such protection for ODF Text documents. - Dennis