Did you work in the wee hours? Did you scramble to finish right before deadline? Do your tracked changes and comments reveal more than you feel is professional about your work habits? If clients can’t let this go or it’s bothering you too much, try this tiny macro that Samantha Pico commissioned that will go into the background coding and remove the time stamps, and only the time stamps from all tracked changes, leaving your beautifully branded user tag in place.
Macro that erases time stamps in Word
Custom coder Muhammad Bilal created this macro & allowed us to share it here. Paste the code below (from Sub to End Sub) into the Macro viewer (VBA editor). See the instructions and video demo on how to do that in the book.
Sub Remove_TrackedChanges_Date_Time()
Dim sWOOXML As String
Set objRegEx = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
objRegEx.Global = True
objRegEx.IgnoreCase = True
objRegEx.MultiLine = True
objRegEx.Pattern = "w:date=""\d{4}-\d{1,2}-\d{1,2}T\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}Z"""
sWOOXML = ActiveDocument.Content.WordOpenXML
sWOOXML = objRegEx.Replace(sWOOXML, "")
ActiveDocument.Content.InsertXML sWOOXML
Beep
End SubTroubleshooting
Remember to turn off tracking before running this macro! If not, the entire document will be marked as changed.
This affects all changes, not just ones made by you. Unlike the “remove personal data” function, this works only when run, not every time the file is saved.
This may require some tweaking to work on Mac computers, depending on the OS.
Credits
Custom coder Muhammad Bilal is bests contacted through Facebook, but you can also find him on Fiverr as well as his helpful YouTube tutorials.
Samantha Pico is a fiction editor who runs Miss Eloquent Edits.
Photo of rusted old time stamp clock by Michael Gaida from Pixabay.
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© This blog and all materials in it are copyright Adrienne Montgomerie on the date of publication. All rights reserved. No portion may be stored or distributed without express written permission. Asking is easy!