I am working on a project to prepare a document that has undergone multiple rounds of edits with tracked changes and comments. I need to combine all of the changes and comments into a single document for archival purposes. When I combine all of the individual documents together to form the archival master (that is supposed to have all the tracked changes) using combine documents, weird duplicated text and links are starting to appear and it's not clear to me how they are happening nor an efficient way of removing them.
I am combining 8 documents and the final product looks like this in places:
Asian citrus psyllidMonitor for Asian citrus psyllids looking atlyIs
psyllids are .Monitor by conducting a visual surveyAsian citrus psyllidAsian citrus psyllid looking at),If .spidermiteAsian citrus psyllidAsian citrus psyllid looking at.by conduction a visual surveyor tap Is),If .Asian citrus psyllidAsian citrus psyllid looking at.), If
.Asian citrus psyllidAsian citrus psyllid looking at.by conducting a visual survey or tap Is),psyllids are endemic.action if
In the published final version, this text makes sense. It gets all messed up going throught the document combinations.
Has anyone experienced a problem like this before? I can duplicate the error in simple texts with where duplicate text appears, but I can't really figure out what's happening to cause it.
I have tried a number of things to try and fix this:
- Reversed the order of combining the documents. This did nothing.
- Tried to do the document combination with none of the different combine document items checked in the options (formatting, headers and footers) except for "comments". This did nothing.
- Changed all of the names of the authors so that they were all unique. I was wondering if it was something to do with Word not recognizing different changes made by the same author. This did nothing.
Any insights that would help me get to the bottom of this would be really appreciated.
Thanks!