Tracking changes and conversations

If you were following along with me in the previous lesson, we were adding comments to a document. Even replying to existing comments. Having mini conversations with those people that we are sharing a document with. Something else happened when we started adding comments, and if we go to the Review tab here on the ribbon, you'll see that Track Changes has been turned on. And there is something new to Track Changes that we should explore here now. And that is something called Simple Markup. It is the default. We can click the dropdown to see All Markup, No Markup, et cetera, but the new feature here in Word 2013 is called Simple Markup.

And if you prefer to read your documents in an uncluttered manner while tracking changes, you are going to like this. For example, if we go down to the next title heading here, Physical Representation, and with Track Changes turned on, click right after the asterisks and then backspace to take it out, you can see it's actually removed, but we don't see the Markup right in the document. All we see is now over here in the left-hand margin, there is a vertical bar. And we can click it to see, or show, the track change.

Let's just scroll a little further down and see what I mean. On the next page, we do see one of those red vertical bars next to the Black & White-negative, and if we move over to it, and click it, we actually see the change that was made, and you can see what was deleted. If we hover over that change we can see who made it, and when. And if we no longer want to see that, we can go back to that vertical bar, which is change colors to gray, and click it again to hide those changes. So it's called Simple Markup. And it's a nice little feature to allow you to view your documents uncluttered while tracking changes.