I have found a few posts about this, but I haven’t seen an answer to how to permanently disable this function. One comment is that the changes are harmless. They are not - as soon as you export the file (to .xhtml, for example), the changes all show up.
The only way I have found to get around this is to open the file, show the changes, toggle the option to turn off tracking and then manually go through the file and delete all the items that are struck-through. I have no use/no desire to keep track of the changes and just want to permanently turn off the function (including the option to disable/remove changes in a file that I receive from someone else). Or, if there is some option to completely wipe the document clean before exporting it, that would be OK, too.
I don’t see any problem with just disabling Edit -> Track Changes -> [ ] Record. If that is disabled no changes you make are tracked. This doesn’t affect changes made by other people, which you can view by View -> Track Changes (which is a pure viewing option). Of course, if you get a document already containing tracked changes, at some point someone needs to accept/discard changes (using: Edit -> Track Changes -> Manage) before a document becomes track-free.
The keyboard shortcut to turn on tracking is Ctrl-Shift-C. If you work with Linux terminal, that key combination also copies text from terminal. I use it alot, and apparently accidentally turned this on (while working in Windows, no less), subsequently collecting hundreds of changes that LO began tracking from that point forward.
Not to mention a very annoying habit: The track changes toolbar gets turned on when there are changes to accept/reject.
I love LO. I use it daily. I know I can change any keyboard shortcut I want. Please don’t tell me to do that.
Writing is for MOST users MOST OF THE TIME a solitary activity. In my very large company, only the Legal Dept uses track changes (in MS Word). The rest of the world uses PDFs and other workflow tools to indicate revisions.
And so: It would would be a nice feature to have track changes more difficult to turn on and keep it out of the way.
LO keeps getting better and better and I love updating and exploring it like it’s an old friend returning from vacation with fascinating stories. But, I spent a lot of time figuring this one out (finally winding up here), and although @Kittyrinn was obviously frustrated, s/he has a point. Angry people can also have good ideas.
You are wrong here with your post - you should file an enhancement request at Bugzilla to address the issue of a shortcut which is prone to inadvertently activating Track Changes feature.
@anon73440385 Why is it wrong to comment here in this fashion? Sure, I could submit it as a bug/enhancement, but it’s not a bug, LO is working as intended, and quite frankly, there are many more things that I’m sure the dev team would like to focus on.
In the meantime, those like me and @Kittyrinn who have wrestled with track changes have some more context.
I’m running LO 24.8.3.2 in Windows 11 Pro and, ever since vers. 24, the track changes in the tens of thousands, around 100k in any single, of several files, crashing LO just trying to load a file, several times/day!!! It cannot be turned off at all (much less permanently) from View, from Edit or from Options (All suggested options either don’t t exist or are grayed-out non-operable). I’ve used LibreOffice for years when it was OpenOffice. It’s now unusable. Every time there’s an update that function gets turned back on and, each time, trying to get it turned off becomes an even worse nightmare. Now, I simply cannot find any way to turn it off. My near-new, high-end, lots of memory, computer is overwhelmed simply trying to load any one of several of my most used files. LO, not the computer, crashes just on the attempt to load any one of several files. Some files I simply can no longer load! Not all LO users share files. We have NO use for this feature! So now I need to have some way to give myself permission to approve my own changes in order to edit my files? Seriously? But it prevents us from using LO. NOTHING suggested turns it off any longer. If this issue isn’t addressed I’ll have no alternative than switching to another suite that can open and perform basic editing of my files–and I really dread what a trial that would be, I NEED a way to clean out all of the changes AND turn it off so that updates, other files or whatever cannot bring it back.
If track changes is turned on for every new document then maybe you have set a default template that has Track Changes set to record. In that case Edit the template and turn off Track Changes. Note that having Track Changes turned on in the template doesn’t prevent you turning it off in the new document
.
To edit the template, click File - Template - Manage templates, right click the file with the green tick and select Edit. With the template open, click Edit > Track Changes > Record to toggle Track Changes off (icon for Record is not highlighted).
If there isn’t a file with a green tick then you have not set a default template and Writer uses the built in template.
If there is no default template and the menu items are not accessible then test in LibreOffice safe mode. Click Help > Restart in safe mode > Continue in Safe mode.
Create a new document, is Track Changes turned on?
Open an existing document.
Can you toggle off Track Changes by clicking Edit > Track Changes > Record?
If so, can you click Edit > Track Changes > Accept All?
If the tests above are OK then exit Safe Mode by closing LibreOffice.
You can reset your user profile but carefully read this first, LibreOffice user profile - The Document Foundation Wiki . I would use the manual version but regardless, backup your profile first so you can copy back templates, wordbook, macros, AutoText, etc.
First Edit → Track Changes → Accept All (or Reject All, or Manage to walk through the changes and individually accept/reject), then switch off Edit → Track Changes → Record.
My scenario (below) was resolved by using the option to manage the changes (which I missed before posting the comment below).
Once an item is deleted, it seems to be saved and the Export function then ‘sees’ it and includes it in the new file format. I was able to easily re-create:
I created a new file, took option to turn on track changes.
Added 3 lines:
This is a new text file.
Adding another line.
Now adding another line.
Saved the file. Exitted file.
Re-opened the file for editing. Deleted the ‘Adding another line’ line. Saved the file.
Turned off option for tracking changes, turned on to ‘show’ the changes - I could see the ‘Adding another line’ struckthrough.
Turned off option to show changes. Turned off option to track changes.
Saved file. Took option to ‘Export’, exported as xhtml.
Viewed the xhtml in my browser. I see:
This is a new text file.
Adding another line.
Now adding another line.
When I view the .odt in writer with the track changes -show option on, I see:
This is a new text file.
Adding another line.----> this line is shown as struck-through (ie, deleted). Thus, I wouldn’t expect (don’t want) it to show up when I view the xhtml in my browser.
Now adding another line.
I am running: Version: 6.2.2.2 (x64)
Build ID: 2b840030fec2aae0fd2658d8d4f9548af4e3518d
CPU threads: 12; OS: Windows 10.0; UI render: GL; VCL: win;
Locale: en-US (en_US); UI-Language: en-US
Calc: threaded
I find it just as annoying. Whoever it was who decided this had to be permanently turned on should be fired. The only time it’s even of any use is when two or more people are editing the same file. It doesn’t need to be on when I’m entering first draft material. I make so many changes my document would soon become unreadable. Please, if there is anyone who knows how to switch the default to off I’d like to hear it. All the fixes I see do nothing more than shut it off until I start up the program again.
If it starts ever and ever again on new documents, you seem to have
either a default template, which has the setting turned on (solution: Change your default template - and btw: If that’s the case, you are the one who should be fired according to your own rant, because a customized default template is defined by the user)
or you suffer from a corrupt user profile (solution: reset your LibreOffice user profile to factory settings)
you don’t understand that nobody can be fired, because people developing LibreOffice are not hired by LibreOffice
FYI - I had this problem and here is what worked for me. Some background info: I saved an original file that was .odt format to a .docx file. The original file (odt) had tracked changes on. This caused the docx file to keep popping up a notice that tracked changes was enabled.
The simple solution for me was to go back to the original odt file and in the menu choose “View” then click on the “Show track changes” to turn it off. Save the odt document . Then go back to the docx document and save it. Close it out, then reopen it. That should take care of it. Hope this helps someone.
The answer to peggler’s question has already been given by erAck, but as the matter is rather counterintuitive, I will express it again with more detail.
Imagine you have been working with a document for a while, and Libre Office Writer has kept track of the changes made – which may be thousands. These changes don’t show up when you open the document in Libre Office Writer, so you are probably unaware that the program is keeping track of then. However, imagine you export the file (say to .docx) and send it to other people. Then, when they open the document in MS-Word, these changes show up and the file appears jumbled.
In this case, there is an easy way to ‘completely wipe the document clean before exporting it’, as peggler wants. However, the way to do it is rather counterintuitive, which is why so many people are troubled by this problem. In fact, some people take this problem to be an unsolvable incompatibility between Libre Office Writer and MS Word (or between Linux and Windows), and they cease to use Libre Office Writer (or even Linux) altogether.
Well, in order to clean the record of changes of a document, you must go to Edit > Track Changes > Manage and hit Accept All. By ‘accepting’ the changes, they disappear from the metadata of the document (the record of changes becomes clean again).
After you have done that, you can safely export the document to docx, and send it to other people. When they open it in MS Word, they will see the clean last version of the document.
However, it seems that in last versions, somewhere after 24.8.0, it was partially broken, only showing for the very first time the document opened in this session (it won’t open on reopening the same document in the same session - maybe that was an intentional change?).
OK, mikekagansi, thanks so much for your post. However, I think that the real problem here is not whether users are aware that Libre Office Writer is keeping track of the changes made in the document. That in itself is normally harmless.
The real problem here (the problem which peggler pointed to) is that unbeknown to users, when they save the document as .docx, and other people open it in MS Word, all the changes previously made in the document show up (the document appears jumbled). However, when the same docx document is open in Libre Office Writer, these changes don’t show up, so for the user of Libre Office Writer it’s difficult to get to know what is going wrong.
Hence, I think it would be much more effective, in order to help users of Libre Office Writer out of this problem, that in the ‘Export’ and ‘Save As’ dialogues there was a visible warning that tells you something like this:
‘Before saving this document in other format (such as .docx, .doc or.xhtml), you are advised to clean the record of changes (by going to Edit > Track Changes … etc). Otherwise, when the document is open in MS Word (or other word processors or browsers), these changes may show up and the document may appear jumbled’.
Wrong: it is a privacy issue. If you don’t know that your changes are tracked, you may send a document to others, that contains something beyond of what you see. Consider a corner case, when you open a document with your passwords, delete everything, put some “Hi, how do you do” text, and send to someone else. The more likely case would be opening a document you wrote to one customer, using it as a template; delete the text, write the new text, and send it to another customer, without realizing, that you included some info not meant to be seen by that other customer.
But that’s what the infobar is about: you open the document, and now you know that changes are there.
It is something close to 0% efficiency: people tend to ignore everything shown there. And doing an explicit check every time, in a sequence like this:
Open the document
Work on it
Click to save it
Read the warning
Go to a tool to check
Try to make sense of that tool, including if it is applicable to your case
Save again
is simply much much worse than
Open the document
Learn immediately that there are track changes; and decide if you are OK with them, or you want to do something
Work
Save.
The document is free of tracked changes → you are not bothered. The document has them → you learn immediately. There is no “You already saved, but now go check if there are issues, and get back to saving again - and maybe you don’t have the issue we are talking about” nonsense.
Additionally: there are countless issues possible when saving to an external file format. E.g., there are issues with colors (in Word, character highlighting may only have 15 colors); page styles won’t save (there is no such concept in Word); page border size limitations … actually, hundreds of “Word doesn’t support that”, or “we do it differently” things. What you decided to focus on here is just one of them … why only limit to one? everyone would want to have their own pet problems there. So imagine a dialog showing all the issues detected in a document - that would be simply unusable dialog.
