As many of you know, I do a lot of Technical Reviewing of books and wrote the 3rd Edition update of O’Reilly Active Directory as well as wrote the Exchange chapter of the Windows Server Cookbook (which got mostly slipped into the Active Directory 3e book as well as the Active Directory Cookbook 2e) so I am pretty familiar at this point with using “Track Changes” in Microsoft Word.
At first it annoyed the heck out of me but I really grew to like and dare I say depend on it. It is great when collaborating with others and you need to mark the doc up and you need to make sure they know what you did…
So now my friend Dean and I are working on a PowerPoint slide deck…. Guess what. No one who works on Power Point at Office Dev in Redmond must have ever used Word or at least never noticed the “Track Changes” option. One of the main reasons to use Office instead of say notepad and they don’t put it in.
If I could ask for 2 things for Office 12 they would be in order
1. Outlook uses LDAP instead of NSPI when using Exchange… come on guys, you have had 6 years to make this change. At the very least have the ability to select to use LDAP instead of NSPI. NSPI sucks my ass to put it nicely.
2. All of the Office tools get “Track Changes”.
There’s a compare and merge presentations feature, which could help? I use the comparable feature in Word all the time and it generally works a charm. The only major messiness is things like fields, including Tables of Contents, but you simply scroll past that and get on to looking at actual changes.