MS Word: How to handle revisions correctly

[jokerbenj]

Dear forum members,

I ma facing an issue related to the quality of the traceability inside a document. All the engineering reports of my company are written in Word. But, the quality requirements asks to be able to trace the details of the revision of the documents in an accurate way:

- The revision of each page must be traced, and written on each page.
- A table in the beginning describes the revision (already in our templates)
- On each page, the modified parts must be seen.

On Word, this is really complicated to fulfill all of this automatically. For example, on each page, the revision number written in the header or footer will be the same on all the pages. And I do not want to modify manually each page revision number (a document can be revised 10 times, pages can be removed or added).

Do you have a template or a methodology to do this correctly?
Thanks for your help!

 

[swertel]

You use an external record, often called an ECO, ECR, or DCN.

On the external record, you record what changed. Your change log in the table at the beginning of your report lists the revision, revision date, and change record (ECO number).

--Scott
www.wertel.pro

 

[IRstuff]

change tracking gives you date/time/author of each revision. But, a page rev ID is so 80s, when changing an entire document was a PITA. We only rev the document and only when approved by a CCB. Rev'ing a single page for one change is absurd.

TTFN
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[IRstuff]

and btw. this approach does not appear to be consistent with ISO requirements.

TTFN
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[jokerbenj]

Thank you for your advices. But what are the ISO requirements?

Does one of you have templates or examples of the best practices?

 

[IRstuff]

ISO certification requires that documentation be intrinsically up to date, i.e., on-line and live. Page revs are an artifact of a paper-based system, which cannot be inherently up to date.

TTFN
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[dik]

I save by appending a six digit number for yymmdd. I then save it as an archive file.
This saves the actual document for that date.
My general drawing notes archive may cntain 100 plus files, for example.

Dik

 

[IRstuff]

One option for local archiving is Subversion

TTFN
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[MintJulep]

The revision of each page must be traced, and written on each page.

So you define a policy that states that reports are revised at a document level, not a page level, and that all pages of a document are at the same revision level always. Put the document revision level in the footer of each page. There, you have complied with the letter of the requirement

On each page, the modified parts must be seen.

Word's "Track Changes" feature does this. It does it better if you change the settings to underline/strike-out instead of using balloons for deleted text.