Accept Changes

In addition to having Fast Saves on, the company president had made sure the reviewing features were on. This helped him track what changes he had made to the file and to communicate those changes to Bryan. When Bryan opened the files, he got an "Accept changes?" message for each one.

When Bryan realized the reviewing features were on, he accepted the appropriate changes and saved the document. The file size decreased to about where it was before the review. Now, Bryan is ready to work on optimizing the presentation file size even further.

Tip 38: Problems with a file you sent out for review? Help is here!

Ever send a file out for review, accept the changes, save the file, and still see popups asking whether you want to review the changes when you open the file? One clue all changes have not been accepted is a file just won't shrink in size even after you've accepted changes. It happens sometimes. Here's what's going on.

Sometimes, when you accept changes, not all the change flags within the document get cleared. In these cases, you might think the file has been disconnected from the reviewed files, but it hasn't.

To fix this, open the file and make a slight change such as adding a space in a sentence or adding an extra empty paragraph. Save the file with a new name . Close the newly renamed file. Reopen the original file. Do a Tools ’ Compare and Merge Documents. Select the new file to compare against. You have not changed files, you are still looking at the original file. You have added the changes from the second file to the original file.

Using the reviewing features, delete all changes on the current slide. Close the file. When prompted to save changes, say yes. This will save the original file and clear out the reviewing information from it.

When you re-open the file, you should receive no indication there are changes waiting for you to accept or reject.

What happened was when you rejected the slight change, you cleared out all the reviewing information in the file. This shrinks the file back down to its original size and cleans up all the reviewing marks.

I have seen cases where resolving the reviewing situation shrinks the file by more than 75% of the original size.