1. posterid:78119
  2. How to understand MS Word deletions and insertions

Re: How to understand MS Word deletions and insertions

Quentin Christensen
 

Tracking of deletions and insertions in Word can become very complex, very quickly.  I should say though, I can turn on track changes, edit a document, and NVDA - with UIA enabled - will report the changes correctly.

My comment about turning off showing the edits, was a suggestion based on that this particular document seemed quite convoluted and your wording indicated you were simply trying to read the latest version of it without needing to know what had been changed along the way.

I think a lot of the complexity can stem from how word records the changes and also how they are done.  Yes it could be simpler, but I think in this case, NVDA is simply reading what it gets from Word.

If the original sentence is "I have a cat", and you want to change it to "I have a dog", then exactly how you edit it will change how Word presents the change:

You could backspace over the word cat and then type dog
You could select the word cat, then delete it (or not) and then type the word dog
You could turn on overtype mode and type d o g over c a t

If a consistent way of making these changes is used then it might be easier to read a document knowing the inserted text is read before (or after) the deleted text, but in other cases, it could be either way.  It could even be parts of words - I might remove part of a sentence and make a word, previously in the middle of a sentence, start the new sentence, in that case, NVDA won't even read the full word as a word, because part has been deleted and part inserted.

If you can send me the original file off list confidentially, I'm happy to have a look.

Kind regards

Quentin.

On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 12:59 PM Brian Vogel <britechguy@...> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 10, 2022 at 08:51 PM, Luke Davis wrote:
I guess that shouldn't be expected, as Brian pointed out.
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Believe me, that was said without a trace of snark, too.  Depending on exactly how convoluted the editing was, it is very, very easy for that tracking to become very incomprehensible very quickly.  Lots of single character or functor word changes (e.g, is, a, of, in) not done at the same time but in back and forth makes things particularly crazy, and certain editors are far more structured in how they edit than others.

I always look at the text as it exists and if there are mistakes, remedying those, rather than trying to ferret out intent from edits.
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Brian - Windows 10, 64-Bit, Version 21H2, Build 19044

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

        ~ Mark Twain



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Quentin Christensen
Training and Support Manager
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