Tracking changes

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

Does Aspose.word support the feature Track changes feature of Microsoft word? We need this feature for one of our application development.

2

This is an interesting issue.

We’ve just removed all code that was related to tracking changes (revision marks) in our stride to improve performance and memory utilization. It seemed like an easy way to make some significant gains by dropping this never requested before feature.

Can you please explain in a little more details the nature of your project and why you need to produce or process documents with revision marks? If you want to maintain project confidentiality, please mail to word@aspose.com. We might consider putting this feature back and optimizing with it.

3

I also have to use tracking changes in my application and would like to be able to use it. Did you guys ever add the changes back into the DLL?

4

We still have it in the plans, but sorry, have not done any work yet. No exact estimate at this stage either, maybe 2-3 months.

5

Hi, Is it possible now to show change tracking in a Word document that I am creating on the fly using Document Builder?

Regards,
Jerry Howard

6

With Aspose.Words you can add the changes comments manually, using code like this:

Comment comment = new Comment(doc);

builder.CurrentParagraph.AppendChild(comment);

comment.Paragraphs.Add(new Paragraph(doc));

comment.FirstParagraph.Runs.Add(new Run(doc, “Some coment.”));

Unlike MS Word comments in Aspose.Words can be bound only to paragraph end marks rather than arbitrary range in the document. That is a temporary limitation which will be corrected in the future versions.

Regards,

7

I don’t understand. I am talking about showing colored text with underlines for additions and colored text with strikethough for deletions. And having MS Word understand that these are changed sections. So that the special highlighting can be shown or not depending on the MS Word track/changes settings.

I’m not really talking about comments as far as I know. Do comments somehow interact with change tracking?

Regards,
Jerry

8

Inserting tracking changes is not supported in Aspose.Words.

Tracking changes are essentially comments which can be generated by MS Word, and are highlighted and organized in a special way.

Best regards,

9

Hi Mikolovan,

Do we have the functionality of “Set Tracking On/Off in Aspose.Words (version 3.7.0.0)”.

We have just acquired the license for the Aspose version 3.7.0.0, and require to set Tracking on/off through the code, while user works on a word document . We also requires that the user can not put the tracking Off manually.

Regards

Vivek Bahl

10

This property is not available in our public API. I think we can make it public in our next release, which will be published in a few weeks. I have logged this as a feature request (issue #1121).

I am not sure about your second request, that the user can not put the tracking Off manually. Do you know how it can be done in MS Word? If it is possible in MS Word, we will probably be able to implement it in Aspose.Words too.

Best regards,

11

Any ETA on this feature. we have been waiting for Aspose to add this feature as our document workflow depends a lot on this feature. I guess my team member vivekb has already posted this on your forum. It would be greatly appreciated if you let me know the tentative schedule for the release of this feature.

Thanks,

Abhishek

12

The fix will appear in the next version which will be published in the end of August.

Best regards,

13

Sorry for any confusion. It is time to clarify. I wrote an article that explains how Aspose.Words supports Track Changes/Reivsions https://docs.aspose.com/words/net/track-changes-in-a-document/

I think there was a confusion in this discussion between:

1. Making Aspose.Words to actually track all changes made programmatically so they appear as revisions in Microsoft Word.

-and-

2. Exposing the boolean property that is stored inside a document and tells whether the track changes is turned on or off in the document. This basically affects how Microsoft Word displays the document and the Reviewing toolbar.

I think miklovan had in mind 2., this surely can be done. But I think the customer wanted 1. and this is a serious new feature. Sorry we have not actually been planning to implement this.

Now if the confusion is cleared, I will put this feature “make Aspose.Words to track all changes made programmatically” onto our task list. Sorry there is no time estimate at this stage as we appear a bit overwhelmed with new features.

14

Has #2 above (exposing the Track Changes as a boolean property) been done for 3.7.1 or 4?

15

This task is now logged as issue #1247. It is not implemented yet. We will probably implement it in Aspose.Words 4.0 release version which will be published in a few weeks.

Best regards,

16

Hi Chris,

Do you really need this property? Do you understand it will be just a boolean setting that will affect whether tracking changes are turned on/off for this document in Microsoft Word. It will not affect how Aspose.Words works in any way. That is if you insert or remove text in Aspose.Words, they will not be tracking changes.

I’m afraid that if we add this property, customers will be confused by that. They will attempt to set this property to true and expect that Aspose.Words will be adding tracking changes to everything that do with the document programmatically. And this is a feature that is not yet planned for immediate priority.