WD2002: The 'Legal Blackline' Option Does Not Display the Correct Author (328746)

SYMPTOMS

When you use the Legal blackline option in the Compare and Merge feature in Word 2002, the name of the author that made changes to a document are incorrectly changed to the name of a different author.

CAUSE

When you use the Legal blackline option in the Compare and Merge feature, Word 2002 marks all the content that is in the original document, but not in the revised document, as being changed by the author of the original document. Likewise, Word 2002 marks all content that is in the revised document, and not in the original document, as being changed by the author of the revised document.

MORE INFORMATION

The names that are attributed to changes during the merge process should always be ignored. Future versions will remove the names to avoid confusion.

When you use the Legal blackline option for document comparison, the idea is to show you exactly how the two documents are different. The way that Word 2002 does this, is to show you exactly what changes must be made to the first document (original) to make it look similar to the second document (revised).

When you accept all changes (or select to view Final from the Reviewing toolbar), you receive the second document. When you reject all changes (or select to view Original from the Reviewing toolbar) you receive the original document.

NOTE: In the next version of Microsoft Word, the author information is not planned to be included when you use the Legal blackline option in the Compare and Merge feature.