Word - Tracking Changes

Tags Word Changes

Background Information

To facilitate inline review, Microsoft Word allows you to easily make and view tracked changes and comments in a document. In order to preserve the layout of your document, Word shows some markup elements in the text of the document, while others are displayed in balloons that appear in the margin.  Note that several of these concepts can be used in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.

Turning On/Off the Track Changes Feature

Follow these steps to enable (or disable) the tracking of changes:

  1. Open the Document in Word.
  2. From the Review Tab, click Track Changes.
    • Word will continue to track changes until the feature is turned off.
  3. To disable, click Track Changes.

NOTE: The changes will show in small lines to the left of the text. When you click on the line, the full Markup will display to the right of the page.

Reviewing Proposed Changes

After changes have been made, they should be reviewed and then accepted or rejected.  To do so:

  1. Go to the Start of the document that contains changes.
  2. Click the “Next” or “Previous” to navigate through the changes.
  3. From the “Accept” dropdown you can choose multiple options.
  4. Reject Changes works the same way.

Mark-up Display Options

When tracking document changes, there are four views available which can be accessed from the Display for Review section of the Reviewing Toolbar:

  • Simple Markup – Showing only the lines next to the change.
  • All Markup – Shows both lines of the changes and notes of what was changed.
  • No Markup – Shows what the document looks like after the changes.
  • Original – What the document looked like prior to changes.

Changing the view allows the reviewer to clearly see the original or final version of the document.

 

To review images or save/download/print a copy of this Job Aide, please select the pdf attachment.

Print Article