Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Examining Tracked Changes in a Macro.
If you need to develop a macro to process a document in which changes have been tracked (using the Track Changes feature), you may wonder how you can determine the number of changes in the document and how you can look at each of the changes, programmatically. It isn't that tough to do if you remember that the changes are organized when using the Revisions collection. This means that you can determine the number of changes using this code:
iNumChanges = ActiveDocument.Revisions.Count
Just like any other collection, you can step through each member of the Revisions collection and figure out various information about the changes represented in each particular member. While the details of what properties and methods belong to the Revisions collection is much too voluminous for this tip, you can determine the type of each change by looking at the Type property, in this manner:
vChange = ActiveDocument.Revisions(1).Type
At this point, vChange will be equal to a revision type that Word tracks. The actual number or revision types depend on the version of Word you are using, but these are the potential values and the built-in enumeration names for the revision types:
| Value | Enumeration | |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | wdNoRevision | |
| 1 | wdRevisionInsert | |
| 2 | wdRevisionDelete | |
| 3 | wdRevisionProperty | |
| 4 | wdRevisionParagraphNumber | |
| 5 | wdRevisionDisplayField | |
| 6 | wdRevisionReconcile | |
| 7 | wdRevisionConflict | |
| 8 | wdRevisionStyle | |
| 9 | wdRevisionReplace | |
| 10 | wdRevisionParagraphProperty | |
| 11 | wdRevisionTableProperty | |
| 12 | wdRevisionSectionProperty | |
| 13 | wdRevisionStyleDefinition | |
| 14 | wdRevisionMovedFrom | |
| 15 | wdRevisionMovedTo | |
| 16 | wdRevisionCellInsertion | |
| 17 | wdRevisionCellDeletion | |
| 18 | wdRevisionCellMerge | |
| 20 | wdRevisionConflictInsert | |
| 21 | wdRevisionConflictDelete |
Additional information can be found in Word's Help system or by searching the Internet for the phrase "revisions collection". Information about the enumerations can be found at this Microsoft site:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff839110.aspx
Note:
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8922) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Examining Tracked Changes in a Macro.
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2018-10-31 09:46:29
Andrew
My fellow Andrew (or in this case, Andreas): In my experience (confirmed at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24938768/does-collection-preserve-ordering) the order of collections (words, sentences, paragraphs, revisions) is the order they appear in the document. The built-in collections are merely view into a document as it currently exists. And this behavior for revisions is contractual--in the Revisions case, the documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/word.revisions), says: "Use Revisions (Index), where Index is the index number, to return a single Revision object. The index number represents <i>the position of the revision in the range or document</i>."
2018-10-30 04:05:29
Andreas Bergvall
Hi Allen
I'm trying to find out whether the revisions collection is always sorted in a particular order. Microsoft's help page doesn't say anything, and I found nothing on the web. On a couple of example documents it seems to be sorted based on the position in the document, but I want to know if I can trust this always to be true. In my case I'm only interested in insertions and deletions. Do you have any information about this?
Thanks
Andreas
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: 
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