Better collaboration with Word’s Track Changes

When you circulate documents among colleagues for review and comment, there's nothing more practical and useful than the ability to track changes. Microsoft Word includes powerful tools for recording, accepting and rejecting changes, appending comments, comparing documents, and merging documents. But, if you're like most Word users, you know little about how this set of features can help you.

Say you've written a report, and need to send it around to different departments for various people to fact-check the text, verify certain figures, or make changes to reflect new features in your products. You could print out the document, and have each of your colleagues scribble their corrections using pencils, pens, and highlighters, and then glue sticky notes on it with comments. You could then collate all these printed documents, and make the changes to your master file. But why bother using such a complex method? You can do the same things with Word, but keep all the comments in digital copies of your file.

Get started

To turn on change tracking, open a file in Word and click the tiny TRK button in the status bar at the bottom of Word's window. To make changes, just start typing in the document: add text to it, or delete words you don't like. Word marks up the document in several ways. What you see depends on the view you're in and the options you choose in the Reviewing toolbar. (This toolbar displays at the top of your Word window when you turn on change tracking. If you can't see it, select View -> Toolbars -> Reviewing.)

Draft view (previously Normal view in Word 2004) can be the easiest to use when you're tracking changes. To use it, select View -> Draft. It shows both what you've deleted, in one color, and what you've added in another. However, in some cases, changes won't display correctly; if this happens to you, try turning off change tracking then turning it on again. (You can change these colors and other options in Word's Track Changes preferences, but I generally find it easiest to use the defaults.) In addition, Word places a thin bar in the left margin of each line that contains a change.

Since each user of Word enters his or her name when setting up the preferences, you can circulate the same document among several people, and each of their comments and changes will show in different colors.

Change the view

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