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I am attempting to copy both the text and the edits (comments, deletions, etc. that show up in the Review) from one Office 365 Word doc into another Office 365 Word doc. It worked once without doing anything special (I just copied and pasted), but I can't get it to work again.
How is this accomplished? Track Changes is on in the original doc. I tried turning the "track changes" off in the receiving doc; I tried turning "track changes" on in the receiving doc. Nothing works.
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
To preserve the tracked changes when you copy and paste, tracking should be turned off in both documents (source and target). The rules that apply are described in the following article by Shauna Kelly:
https://shaunakelly.com/word/sharing/howtrackchangesworks.html#HowToCopyTextContainingTrackedChanges
[deleted reply]
Here's something to note! I followed these instructions, but found that in my original document, the copied text was locked.
There is no good reason to do this. All I wanted was to send an email that contained the comments so that I could ask a question. But now, the whole section is locked for editing and I can't make the changes I need to make.
Word team needs to consider the consequences of their decisions, because locking the copied section for editing is a terrible idea and should never have been a default, undocumented, unwarned about issue.
However, as soon as you switch on track changes every comment ever made in the source document is still there in the target.
However, as soon as you switch on track changes every comment ever made in the source document is still there in the target.
Yeah, comments will be preserved, but you can delete all comments in one step from the Review tab. The details depend on whether you want to keep some comments in the target document or not.
If you have existing comments that you want to keep in the target document, add an "intermediate" step as follows: Copy the content into a new, blank document first, delete the comments (Review tab > Comments group > Delete > Delete All Comments in Document) and then select, copy and paste into the final destination.
Remember that if there is markup (Deletions, Insertions, etc.) in the text, the rules from https://shaunakelly.com/word/sharing/howtrackchangesworks.html#HowToCopyTextContainingTrackedChanges will apply.