How to copy revision information from one Word document to another. The Word’s Spike feature will cut and paste revisions in a document plus standard paste will work if you know the trick.
We love feedback from readers, especially when it uncovers some peculiarity in Microsoft Office.
Anne C. read Rose Vines article about the Spike feature in Word then used our feedback page to tell us about one place Spike can be useful.
Spike (she writes) … it’s the only way to “copy and paste” tracked changes. I am a software trainer at a law firm, and you wouldn’t believe how often attorneys want to copy and paste tracked changes. And they don’t like to hear “No way!”
Spike to the rescue. They just have to remember that Spike removes text, so they should not save the document that was spiked!
Anne is right, Spike will cut and paste revisions in a document but it’s not the only way …
Bob O (another smart Office Watch reader) points out that Word paste will include revisions but only if the source document has Track Changes set OFF when you cut/copy from it. He’s right though it’s counter-intuitive for revision tracking to be off in order to copy those revisions.
When people think about Spike (if at all) it’s considered a cumulative Cut then Paste but there’s more to it.
Copying revisions is very handy and I can understand why legal workers would like it. There are plenty of situations where it’s important to keep a track of the source or development of a document over time.
Let’s say you have two documents. The source document has been revised by many people over time. You want to copy some parts of that document to another target document and keep the revisions information intact. In other words you want to retain the details of who changed what and when.
Here’s a simple source document example:
We’ve selected some text including the ‘changed para’ that’s marked as an insertion. Now let’s copy that to another document.
Standard Paste with Revisions on
If you copy the selected text and paste it into a new document here’s what you get (with Track Changes on):
All the selected text is copied but NOT the revisions information. There’s no way to tell who wrote what.
Spike Paste with Revisions on
Lets try a similar thing but use Spike instead.
Select the text in the source document and press Ctrl + F3 – Spike will cut (ie remove) the selection.
Switch to the target document and paste the Spike’d text using Ctrl + Shift + F3 and here’s what you get: (with Track Changes on):
The pasted text from the Spike has been inserted with the revision information intact.
The big gotcha is that Spike can only remove text, there’s no option to copy text to the Spike.
There’s no logical reason for this and it’s not documented that we could find. We suspect it’s a programming accident and not intentional, which means it may disappear from future versions of Word.
So there’s two solutions to the copying of revisions. Either turn Track changes OFF in the source document before copying or use the Spike.
