We've all likely had adventures with paste in Word. While it's hard, if not impossible, to get paste "right" given the fact that we can't guess user intent with 100% accuracy, we're always working to make the most commonly used command in Word better. Since we ship only once every couple of years,
Office 2010 Professional Key, let's see if in the meantime we can improve the paste experience by explaining what to expect in various circumstances and why. The first being paste in the context of Tracked Changes. There are only three possible behaviors when pasting tracked changes. The one you get depends on whether Track Changes is on or off in both the document you copied from [source] and the document you are pasting into [destination]. The Three Behaviors Note: You cannot copy a deletion and only a deletion from a document with track changes on. The Design Rationale Behind Each Behavior 1: The document you are pasting into is tracking changes, so any content you insert is tracked as such. Deleted content doesn't exist, so we don't paste it as an insertion. But, we do have to track changes, so we paste deleted content as deletions. Behavior 2: The document you are pasting into is not tracking changes, so we don't put tracked changes into it. Instead we accept the tracked changes on paste…inserted content stays and deleted content goes. Behavior 3: We needed to make this is a distinct from behavior 2 to enable the following common scenario: Reorganizing a document that contains tracked changes but has track changes turned off [i.e. past changes were tracked,
Office Home And Stude/nt 2010, current changes are not]. For example,
Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate, say you turn on track changes and send a document out for review. Your reviewers finish and you receive feedback as tracked changes. You then turn off track changes as you need to refine and reorganize the document based on the feedback. Your first step is to move paragraph seven—containing tracked changes—below paragraph twelve. To do this, you cut paragraph seven and paste it below paragraph twelve. When you paste,
Office Professional, you see paragraph seven exactly as you copied it. I.e. The tracked changes are not affected. In this scenario, even though only one document is involved, you copied and pasted tracked changes from a source document with track changes off to a destination document with track changes off. We don't think you'd want the tracked changes automatically accepted in this case [since you just reorganizing content vs. accepting/rejecting tracked changes], so what you copy is what you paste [WYCIWYP…which is fun to try and say out loud]. Appendix A: Track Changes Copy & Paste Matrix This is my first blog appendix J For folks interested in specific cases,
Genuine Windows 7, here's what you can expect in all copy and paste cases involving tracked changes: Note: Cases not explicitly mentioned in the table can be constructed from the cases below. You know the behavior of copying and pasting an insertion and a deletion by looking at the two applicable rows below. -Jonathan <div