Here’s the last part of my series on working with Track Changes. We’ve already learned what Track Changes is, why we use it and where to find it, and how to customise Track Changes to suit our own preferences. Now it’s time to learn how to work with a document that has Tracked Changes – i.e. how to get rid of all those marks and comment boxes and be left with a clean document with no errors.

Why do I need to work with Track Changes in a document?

These instructions will be useful to anyone who has their work edited, critiqued or otherwise commented on by other people. For example, I work in Track Changes with all of my student customers, because they need to see what I’m suggesting they should change so they can make the decisions and retain their understanding and authorship of their own texts.

If a text has Track Changes on it and you want to submit it for your Master’s or PhD, a journal, a magazine that publishes creative writing … you need to remove those Tracked Changes so they don’t show up when someone else reads your document.

(Note: in the last article we looked at how the different views of track changes don’t actually delete the changes – review this article for more information in the section “How can I change which changes I can see?”)

How do I remove the Track Changes markup from my document?

To get back to basics, you’ll find all the buttons and drop-downs you need in the Review tab in Word 2007 or 2010 (or the Tools dropdown in Word 2003):

We’re looking at the Accept / Reject area to the right of this section, and then the New Comment / Delete area to the left.

And let’s just remind ourselves what a document with Track Changes looks like: here’s the one we’ve been working on for a little while now. Additions show up in red underlined, deletions disappear and pop into a comment box, and comments and corrections appear in different colours depending on who entered them:

So, first of all you will need to look at each of the changes that are showing in your document and decide whether to accept or reject them. Then you need to review all the comments, make the necessary amendments, and delete the comment. Finally, you need to check that all the markup has actually disappeared, and you’re left with a nice clean document.

How do I accept changes in a document?

The area you need to look at for accepting (and rejecting) changes is that section in the middle of the Review tab that looks like this.

You will notice that there’s a little arrow on the Accept button; if you drop that down you get a range of choices. Let’s see what happens if you position the cursor by the change you want to accept and hit Accept Change:

You can see that the word “text” has stopped being underlined and changed from red to black. You have accepted the change, and the additional text has basically become part of the actual, final version of the document now.

You can Accept and Move to Next if you want to skip through all of the changes one by one – a good option to take that ensures you don’t miss one. Or you can do this manually using those blue arrows to the right of the Accept and Reject buttons. Or, you can choose Accept All Changes:

If you do this, as you can see, all of the tracked changes (but not the comment boxes) disappear.

Note: I don’t encourage student clients to do this, as I prefer them to look at every change and accept or reject it individually. However, I use this option if I have been asked to provide two versions of a document for a client: one with changes marked and one “clean” copy. It’s a quick way of accepting all the changes I’ve made and seeing what I’m left with.

You can undo any individual Accept Change or Accept All Changes, immediately after you’ve done it, by hitting the Undo button:

How do I reject changes in a document?

Rejecting changes is done in exactly the same way as Accepting changes. Obviously, if your editor has suggested a change for you, they are the expert and it’s worth seriously considering accepting it. But there could be a choice involved (with a comment box nearby explaining it) or you could be working collaboratively with a colleague and deciding to reject a change one of you has made.

Anyway, there’s a Reject button with a dropdown arrow, and the choices are the same, when you place the cursor by a marked change, allowing you to reject just that change or reject it and move on to the next one …

When you reject this change, you will see that the text will revert back to what it said originally, with a word missing. The insertion has been deleted, and again there is nothing there in red or underlined, but that’s because it has been removed from the document.

And again, you can decide to Reject All Changes (not if I’ve made them for you, though!), in which case …

… all of the changes (but not the comments) will disappear and you’ll be left with your original textt, just as it started out. Of course, you won’t want to do this if you’ve asked an editor to offer their suggestions, but you need to know what this does and how to use it.

How do I remove the comments in a document?

OK, so we’ve gone through all of the changes in the text and accepted or rejected them. Now how do we get rid of all those comments in the margin?

The area for doing this is on the left of the Review section. You will see a series of buttons for handling comments:

The important thing to remember here is that, like with the accept or reject changes functions, you need to have the cursor on the affected text when you choose to delete the comment.

When you press the Delete Comment button, both the highlight in the text and the comment box in the margin will disappear:

You can choose to Delete all Comments: I suppose this would be useful if you’ve reviewed all the comments and done what they say, although personally I like to review a comment, do what it instructs, then delete the comment individually, and that’s how I would always recommend you work through them.

Anyway, once you have accepted or rejected all the changes, and deleted all the comment boxes, you should be left with a clean, amended text with no coloured or underlined text, no lines in the left hand margin, and no comment boxes:

Why can’t I make all the Tracked Changes disappear?

You may sometimes find that there are some sneaky bits of markup left in your text once you’ve done all the above. This usually shows up as lines in the margin where a small change has been made.

The other culprit is thinking that you can use the Final Showing Markup menu to hide the track changes. You can’t. Any method you use to customise track changes will only appear in your own version on your own computer. Several of my clients have reported that they have turned off Track Changes, then all the changes have “reappeared” when they re-opened the document. That’s because they had chosen the Show Final option, thinking they had removed the markup but really only hiding it on their version of the document.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, review this paragraph under the heading “How can I change which changes I can see?” for more information on this aspect of customising track changes..

In summary: the only way to remove Track Changes markup is to:

• Go through each change
• Decide whether you accept it
• Accept or reject it
• Move on to the next item
• Review the comments and do whatever you are instructed to do
• Remove the comments once you have reviewed them

If any last vertical lines then remain in the left hand margin, it’s fine to hit Accept all Changes, which will get rid of them once and for all.

———-

This article has taught you how to work with a document that has been marked up using Track Changes. You can read more about what Track Changes is and why we use it, and learn how to customise Track Changes.

If you have found this article useful, please share or “like” it using the buttons below, or leave me a comment to tell me what you think. Thank you!

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

So how do I customise Track Changes (and why would I want to?). Previously, we learned about why you might want to use Track Changes and how to find and use it to delete and add text and make comments. Now we’re going to go one step further and customise it all (and you can also find out how to work with a text that contains tracked changes).

So, here’s our original text with some changes tracked that we created last time:

Why customise Track Changes?

Customising Track Changes basically makes things more comfortable for you and means you can work in a way that suits you. For example, some people like to cross out text in a document, like if you were editing a written manuscript, while others like to remove the deleted text altogether and place it to one side.

Please note: This is customising your view of the document. It’s personal to you, your computer and your document. When someone else opens the document, they will not necessarily see what you see, especially if you’ve customised it away from the defaults. Note this, because it becomes ever so important later on …

How do I customise Track Changes?

Your key area for this is the Review tab, then the section marked Tracking. You can change three things:

• Tracking Options themselves (the colours and fonts that mark the changes)
• Balloons (whether changes are marked within the text or to the side of it)
• Final showing markup (which changes show in your version of the text)

We’ll look at these in turn, and also at what happens when more than one person makes changes to the document.

How do I change the tracking options?

To change the tracking options you need to click on the little arrow at the bottom right of the Track Changes button. This gives you another way to turn Track Changes on and off, a menu item to click to access the tracking options, and a final item we’ll look at later on.

For now, let’s click on that middle menu item. Up pops a great big dialogue box with all sorts of things to change:

I think this is fairly self-explanatory. On the left hand side, you can change how the text appears when you do something to it (underline, double underline, etc.) and on the right hand side you can change the colour.

Let’s change some things …

So here we’ve changed insertions and deletions to double underlines and double crossings-out and the comments to blue. Watch what happens to our text (actually, the crossing-out won’t show up until the next section … )

Because the crossings-out are shown in balloons, not in the text, we can’t see them. But that will all change …

How do I customise the balloons?

Now we’re moving on to talk about what appears in balloons and what appears “inline” or in the text itself.

Important note: This is not how you change what comments themselves look like. For that, you will need to see my posts on comment boxes.

The menu we need here is the next one to the right of the Track Changes button, called, inventively, Balloons:

At the moment, Show Revisions in Balloons is ticked. Note that to change between the options, you need to tick the one you want – no unticking allowed! Try ticking Show All Revisions Inline:

and watch what happens to the document. Gone is the right hand margin, gone are all the balloons, and instead you can see what has been crossed out, and you can only read comments by hovering the mouse over the note indicating there is a comment:

Now, personally I don’t like it looking like this, but some people do.

For more information than you would ever want on how to further customise your balloons, please see my article on customising comment text.

How do I change which changes I can see?

You can review particular changes individually using the next button along: Show Markup. Drop it down and you can see that you can choose to see various kinds of correction, and also only changes made by a particular person:

I don’t think I need to show you examples of all of these – have a play with them and you can see what’s what.

Above this menu item is Final Showing Markup. Now: this is important. Yes, you can choose how you view the document …

For example, you can choose Final and you’ll see the document in its final form with no changes showing:

But: REMEMBER – this is all about what YOU can see. The Tracked Changes have not gone away: they’re still on the document, just hidden. So if you send the document to someone else, they can change their view and see all your changes and comments! Eeps!

You can only “get rid” of changes and comments by accepting or rejecting them, individually or en masse, and that’s a job for next week’s post.

How can I tell which reviewer has made which comments?

If more than one of you is reviewing the document, Track Changes  makes it easy to see who said what. All you need to do is make sure that the “by author” option is chosen in Tracking Options …

… and your comments and alterations will appear in different colours:

Again, avoid telling the other person, “Oh, my comments will appear in blue”, as it’s up to the individual and their own computer as to what colours will appear.

How do I change my initials in comments?

If you want to change your initials in the comments, perhaps because there are two reviewers with the same first initial, you need to go back to Tracking Options and choose Change User Name. This will bring up the Word Options dialogue box, and at the bottom you can change the initials that appear in the comments balloon:

Next time I make a comment, my initials have changed!

However, please note that when I change L to LB here, the change takes effect from that moment, and is not applied retrospectively. Well, you can’t have everything!

A final note

You may want to pin some of your most common choices to the Quick Access Toolbar – read this article to find out how.

So, we already knew how to find Track Changes, today we’ve learned how to customise Track Changes so it works just as we want it to. Next time, we’ll be talking about how to work with the Track Changes you, or someone else, has applied to the document, leaving it nice and tidy and clean! And there will be a separate article on formatting comment balloons, coming soon. In the meantime, if you want to customise the text in your comment balloons or it goes all small or runs from right to left, click on the appropriate links to find out what to do.

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

This is part of my series on how to use Word to the full to get what you need out of it.  Today we’re going to talk about why you might want to use Track Changes, how to find it and how to start using it. Next time, we’ll look at customising Track Changes, then working with the changes that have been tracked and ending up with a nice clean document.

Why use Track Changes?

Track changes helps you collaborate with someone else on your text – or mark it up for yourself. Reasons you might use it:

1. Two or more people are collaborating on a document. You want to know who’s written what, and comment on the work
2. You’re editing someone else’s work. I use Track Changes when working with students, so that they can see what I’m suggesting and make the decision as to whether to accept or reject my changes, thus retaining their control over the changes and the authorship of the text
3. You’re editing your own work – you can see what you’ve deleted and added, or leave notes for yourself, just like working on the paper manuscript

How do I find Track Changes in Word 2003?

Like with most features, once you’ve found this in the menu system, it works the same in 2007 and 2010. This is how you find Track Changes in Word 2003: Go to the Tools menu, drop it down, and select Track Changes.

How do I find Track Changes in Word 2007?

Go to the Review tab, and you will find the Track Changes options half way along the ribbon:

How do I find Track Changes in Word 2010?

This works the same as in Word 2007 – go to the Review tab and you’ll find the Track Changes options half way along the ribbon. The rest of the screen shots will be from Word 2007 but apply equally to Word 2010, as it works in the same way.

How do I turn Track Changes on and off?

You will see a big button marked Track Changes. Don’t worry about the little arrow in the corner for now, just press the button. It will go yellow, and this means Track Changes is turned on, and everything you do to the document from now on will be marked on the document.

If you want to turn Track Changes off, press the yellow button again and it will turn grey. From now on, anything you change will NOT be marked up.

What happens when I delete and add text with Track Changes turned on?

When you add text to the document (marked in blue) it will insert in a different colour, and underlined (note: the colour may not always be red. See the article on customising Track Changes for why and how to change it). When you delete text from the document (marked in red), it will either hook it out of the document and stick it in a balloon to the side of the text (as here, and how I like to do it), or cross it out in the document itself (see the Word 2003 example below). Again, you can choose which it does, and we’ll look at that next time.

How do I add a comment?

Sometimes you might want to add a comment to the document. This is helpful if you don’t understand what the other author is saying, or if something just needs to be commented on. You might want to leave a note for yourself in the margin.

When you want to do this, highlight the text you want to comment on and press the New Comment button in the ribbon. A comment balloon will appear in the right-hand margin, where you can type your comment.

Note, sometimes the text in this box comes out tiny or running right to left, especially if you are commenting on someone else’s document. See those links in the previous sentence? Click on those for how to solve both these problems.

You can pop back into the comment balloon at any time to edit what you’ve typed there.

And what does this all look like in Word 2003? Like this (note the crossed out deleted text):

In the next two posts, we will be looking at how to customise your Track Changes markup, and how to deal with a text containing tracked changes and comments.

Thanks to Kathy O’Moore Klopf for the Word 2003 screen shots!

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here … and do share or post a comment if you have found this useful!