How to get Word to not revision mark a field update whose result hasn't changed?

Question

I am using Word 2010. AFAIK, this problem has been in Word since the beginning of time, though.

When I create a field in a document, the field is updated when I force it to (e.g., with F9 or a right-click menu choice) or as a side-effect of opening or printing the file. All that is good - it's why I used a field. Of course, much of the time (sometimes most of the time), the field update results in no change to the resultant text. For example, {numpages} or a cross-reference or the filename is likely to be unchanged.

Unfortunately, if I have revision tracking turned on, every field update is marked with the old result struck out (deleted), and the new value inserted. This happens even if the value didn't change. After a few episodes of opening, closing, printing, updating, etc., you can end up with something that looks like this (I used bold instead of underline in this example due to limitations of the editor) for a cross-reference

see section 2.3.42.3.42.3.42.3.4

IMHO, Word shouldn't consider it a revision if the result text is unchanged. If there's a way to make Word do that in the first place, I'd like to know about it.

As an alternative, if there's some way to easily remove these superfluous (non)revisions from my doc (while preserving all the "real" revisions), that'd be another solution to my problem.

Thanks,
Yosh

Answer 1

Not a complete solution, but you can avoid the duplicate revisions by turning off tracked revisions just before updating and then turning them back on again after update is complete. You could go further to bind a macro to a keyboard short-cut to do these steps for you automatically.

I'm afraid this wouldn't help much if the fields are being updated automatically before printing however you could choose to turn that off that behavior by going into the options menu, into Display and unticking Update fields before printing.

EDIT: I have written the following macro which should remove such unneeded revisions from fields. It may need some speed improvements if possible.

Sub RemoveUnchangedFieldTrackedChanges()

    Dim oField As Field
    Dim oRevision As Revision

    For Each oField In ActiveDocument.Fields
        For Each oRevision In oField.Parent.Range.Revisions
            Select Case oRevision.Type
            Case wdRevisionInsert
                With oRevision
                    revisionText = .Range.Text

                        For Each iRevision In oField.Parent.Range.Revisions
                            Select Case iRevision.Type
                            Case wdRevisionDelete
                                With iRevision

                                If StrComp(revisionText, iRevision.Range, vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
                                    oRevision.Accept
                                    iRevision.Accept
                                End If

                            End With
                            End Select
                         Next iRevision

                        End With
                End Select
         Next oRevision
    Next oField
End Sub 

Answer 2

I have recently realized that a solution to the question I posed is to NOT use revision marking at all. Instead, after I've finished all my changes, I use Compare Files to create a Rev-marked version of the document. When doing the comparison, I makes sure to not select the Fields option under Comparison Settings:

Since I usually don't care about Formatting and White space changes I de-select those options, too. The final result (I generally select to create a New document) gives me a document with the salient changes and without the unimportant and distracting (non)changes (like Field values).