tracked changes

[profen4]

Using MS Word's TRACK CHANGES tool (Or another tool) Is there a way to see exactly how many words have been deleted and how many added using tracked changes? I mean actual stats. I just finished a lengthy edit on my mss. and I am just curious how much of it I changed.

Obviously I can "see" the changes, but I'm curious about actual word count cut, and word count added.

[BenPanced]

About the only way I'm aware of is a manual process of keeping track of the word count on something like an Excel spreadsheet.

[Medievalist]

You know . . . that's an interesting question.

Let me think about it.

I want to come up with a clever way . . . .on Window, you could write a Visual Basic script, and honestly, there probably is one already. You might look for something searching fo "comapr tracked changes" or similar phrasing.

The dumb-but-effective way is to have .rt files of the pre change version, and the changed version and compare the word count.

If you use Unix, there's a unix command called diff that will compare even the two Word files.

But I still feel like there's a smart way, or a built in way, if I could just remember what it is.

[profen4]

Well there is a "compare" button in the "review" tab, but all that does is show you a tracked up version of the doc. I want to know how many words I deleted, and how many I added.

I'm going to try to google another method.

[cbenoi1]

File->Properties->Statistics. Note the word count.
Edit the file.
File->Properties->Statistics. Note the new word count.
Substract the newer count value from the old one.

-cb

[profen4]

File->Properties->Statistics. Note the word count.
Edit the file.
File->Properties->Statistics. Note the new word count.
Substract the newer count value from the old one.

-cb

But that only shows you the difference in words from one doc to another. If I delete 15K words and add 16K words it will show me a difference of 1K words. I want something that says:

On this tracked up document, 16434 words have been deleted and 18342 new words have been added.

See what I mean? I'm just curious about the percent of change that happens during my editing stage. Of course I can "see" the changes, but I just am curious about the actual stats. I suspect nothing of that sort exists. I will have to send a letter to Microsoft and tell them of my disappointment! I'm sure they'll make something just for me.

[Tirjasdyn]

But that only shows you the difference in words from one doc to another. If I delete 15K words and add 16K words it will show me a difference of 1K words. I want something that says:

On this tracked up document, 16434 words have been deleted and 18342 new words have been added.

See what I mean? I'm just curious about the percent of change that happens during my editing stage. Of course I can "see" the changes, but I just am curious about the actual stats. I suspect nothing of that sort exists. I will have to send a letter to Microsoft and tell them of my disappointment! I'm sure they'll make something just for me.

AFAIK Word cannot do this.

However ywriter and I believe Scrivener for mac does (not sure if the windows version does).

Niether of these does this in a report. Rather it will show total number of words for that day, if they are negative or positive in the status bar.

You might look at some editing software...they might do this.

[Lyra]

The reviewing pane shows the number of edits, broken down into insertions, deletions, moves, formatting and comments. Was that what you meant?

(In Word 2010 it's on the "Review" tab to the right of "Track Changes" and in a similar place in 2007. Or on the "Reviewing" toolbar in 2003.)

[profen4]

The reviewing pane shows the number of edits, broken down into insertions, deletions, moves, formatting and comments. Was that what you meant?

(In Word 2010 it's on the "Review" tab to the right of "Track Changes" and in a similar place in 2007. Or on the "Reviewing" toolbar in 2003.)

Kind of. I was hoping to find something *like* that, only more detailed. With that particular function, if you, say, highlight a block of text 1000 words long, and delete it, the review pane counts it as one deletion. Same goes if you add a block of text 1000 words, it is counted as one addition.

I was hoping to find something that counted each word deleted, or added individually so I could get some real numbers for how much I change my document from first draft to second.