Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” feature enables you to review and either accept or reject each edit in your document. Depending on how you view your edited doc, you might see a red bar along the left side of your text, or it might look as if your text is underlined and written in a new colour; however, such changes are intended only to help you to see what has been edited in your text, and once you accept or reject the suggested edits, the colours, underlining, and red bar will be removed.
The editing process progresses most smoothly if you’re able to accept or reject the edits suggested for you before you return your file to your editor. Here’s how to accept or reject suggested edits:
- Start by downloading your edited file and opening it in Microsoft Word. If you’re looking at your file in Google Docs or in your email’s “preview” option, these settings won’t be visible, and the page layout or formatting might also have errors. Once you’re in Word, go to the Review tab, on the top.
2. Click on “Track Changes”. You will see the options “Simple Markup”, “All Markup”, “No Markup” and “Original”.
3. The option “Simple Markup” will show the tracked changes with a small red line in the margin on the left side of the page, next to a text that has been changed. If your document has a lot of edits, “Simple Markup” might be the best way for you to read your revised document.
4. The option “All Markup” will show you the edited text as if it is underlined and in colour (here, red, but the text can sometimes appear green, purple, or another colour).
Often, the “All Markups” version of a file will have different pagination from the “Simple Markup” version of a file, because the “All Markups” version will show you text that has been deleted or moved, while the “Simple Markups” version won’t show deleted text.
The option “No Markup” will hide markups and show what the text looks like with the suggested changes, and “Original” will show the text before the edits, in its original form. I generally advise against using the “No Markup” and “Original” options; most people like the “All Markup” option, so that they can see each edit in context, but the “Simple Markup” is probably the easiest option if you’re working on a long document.
5. The “Accept” and “Reject” options allow you to accept or reject each suggested edit, one by one.
6. If you want to review and accept or reject your suggested edits one at a time, then you can go to “Accept” and click on “Accept and Move to Next” option (or, similarly, to the “Reject and Move to Next” option.
7. If, however, you want to read the edit text before making decisions, you can do that using either the “Simple Markup” or “All Markups” view, noting to yourself on a piece of paper which edits you want to accept or reject. Some people like to print their document and annotate it with a pen, which can be a great idea
Once you’ve finished reading the doc, you can click on the individual edits that you wish to reject and select “Reject and Move to Next.” Once you’ve rejected all the edits you don’t want to keep, you can then move to “Accept” and select “Accept All Changes.” This move will accept all the edits that haven’t already been rejected. Once you accept all changes, the red markups will disappear and you will only see the finalized text.
8. I ask that you never use the “Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking” or the “Reject All Changes and Stop Tracking” options, as I want to be able to see the changes that you make to the text. When we reach the final version of your document, I can send it to you as a Word doc with track changes turned off or as a PDF, depending on your needs. A PDF is great for ensuring the formatting is perfect, but PDFs are hard to change, so I recommend only using them once a text has been finalized.
If you have any questions about using track changes with your edited file, please contact me.