There is a way to change the author of revisions in a Word document?

Question

I would like to know if there is a way to change the author of revisions in a document, I've found the way to change the author of comments but no for the revisions part. I've tried to find a property/method in the Revisions.object documentation to change that but I find nothing.

As I said I've already tried to do this:

Sub ChangeCommentCreator()
    Dim I As Long
    Dim Novo As String
    Dim Corto As String
    If Selection.Comments.Count = 0 Then
        MsgBox "No comments in your selection!", vbInformation, "Alerta"
        Exit Sub
    End If
    Novo = InputBox("New author name?", "Alerta")
    Corto = InputBox("New author initials?", "Alerta")
    If Novo = "" Or Corto = "" Then
        MsgBox "The author name/initials can’t be empty.", vbInformation, "Alerta"
        Exit Sub
    End If
    With Selection
        For I = 1 To .Comments.Count
            .Comments(I).Author = Novo
            .Comments(I).Initial = Corto
        Next I
    End With
End Sub

I'm going in the right way or there is just no way to change this?

Answer 1

Revisions automatically use the selected User Name in the UI. The language reference for the Revisions's Author property states:

Returns the name of the user who made the specified tracked change. Read-only String.

So there's no direct way using VBA and the object model to change that.

It is possible to change it by editing the underlying Word Open XML, as illustrated in the code that follows. I notice, however, that this appears to confuse Word - after running the macro no revisions are recognized in the document. Only after saving, closing and re-opening does Word "see" the revisions, again.

Sub ChangeAuthorName()
    Dim sWOOXML As String
    Dim findAuthor As String
    Dim replaceAuthor As String

    findAuthor = "w:author=" & Chr(34) & "Cindy Meister" & Chr(34)
    replaceAuthor = "w:author=" & Chr(34) & "unknown" & Chr(34)
    sWOOXML = ActiveDocument.content.WordOpenXML
    sWOOXML = Replace(sWOOXML, findAuthor, replaceAuthor)
    ActiveDocument.content.InsertXML sWOOXML
End Sub

Note that this will likely also change the author's name for comments. The more "elegant" way to do this would be to leverage an XML parser (such as MSXML) and work with the specific nodes. Or even use a package that works on the closed document and edits the Word Open XML. But this is the simplest way using straight Word VBA.