From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

Tracking changes and showing markup - Microsoft Word Tutorial

From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Tracking changes and showing markup

Another way to collaborate on a document with other people is to allow them to make the changes in your document. If you do that, you probably want to turn our feature called track changes. And in fact, if you want to ensure that they are being tracked, you can even lock the track changes feature. That's what we're going to look at now as we work with this document called No Obstacles Recipes Collaboration2. So before we start making changes to this, we can track those changes by going to the Review tab, and turning on Track Changes. Now, just clicking the button at the top, or using Ctrl+Shift+E, is going to turn it on. If you want to turn it on, and ensure that it can't be turned off, click the dropdown. You'll see another option, which is Lock Tracking, and in this case, people will need a password to turn it off. So if you don't share the password, Track Changes will always be on. It's a great way to ensure that you're getting all of the changes made in a document, at lease if they're visible. So we're going to turn Track Changes on. Let's just choose Track Changes. It stays highlighted here on the ribbon, and then what are we going to see in the document as we make changes? Let's say we take text out, or add new text; are we going to see that? What about formatting? Well, we have some options here in the tracking section. First of all, if we click the dropdown where it says All Markup, we get to choose how we're going to view markup; that is the changes we make. Well, Simple Markup is a cool feature that doesn't clutter your document; it just shows you in the left margin that a change has been made, and you can view it or not. All Markup, which is the default, you're going to see everything right in your document, and sometimes it can get a little confusing and cluttered when looking at All Markup. Another option is to not show any of the markup at all, or just show the Original document. Let's try Simple Markup to begin. So with that selected, Show Markup down below when we click the dropdown shows us what type of things will be turned on and visible: Comments, Ink, Insertions and Deletions, any Formatting we do, Balloons. When we move down to that, only comments and formatting will appear in balloons. We could have all revisions inline, right in the text, or in balloons as well. Or we could choose to see changes and markup from specific people. If we have multiple people logged in and using this document, we could choose whose markup we want to view. All Reviewers means when we get all copies back; we'll see all of the revisions color coded. You'll see what I mean momentarily. Also, the Reviewing Pane is something that will pop up automatically. Do you want it vertically or horizontally across the page? By default, it is a vertical pane on the right hand side. So let's see what happens when we start making changes here. So Track Changes is turned on. We've decided to go with Simple Markup. Let's just scroll down here to the bottom of the page, and we'll select this, and we'll change the formatting. So the Web address; let's change the color. First of all, we'll go to the Home tab, and change the color to blue, already something is happening in the left margin, and we'll underline it. In the left-hand margin, we don't actually see what was changed here. We see the end result, yes, but we don't see the original format, and over here on the left-hand side the only thing we're seeing is that changes are being tracked with this simple markup. We can click it to see what should appear when we use All Markup, and that is balloons over here, showing us that some changes were made a few seconds ago. All right, let's go back to the Review tab. With Simple Markup, we can show and hide just by clicking this little marker in the left margin, but when we change it back to All Markup, notice that we're seeing exactly what we saw when we used Simple Markup, and expanded our little marker in the left margin. All right, so there we go; we've made some changes. Let's go down here take out Dear, so I'll double-click, hit the Delete key; you can see what happens. We still see it there in cross out, and we're going to type in some text, To our valued, delete the capital C, put in a lowercase c, move over to the end, and type customers. There we go. So as you can see, after a while it can get a little bit cluttered and confused on the page, so you may want to choose certain things that will show up, certain markup; others you may not want showing up, or you may just decide to go with the Simple Markup. I like that too. All right, so this is something that we would send back to the author, for example. When you are the author, and you receive documents that have changes -- let's take a look at one. Here's one called No Obstacles Recipes Collaboration2b, and you can see this one has some changes already made in it by this person named Karen Leslie. So over here in the left margin, I see those markers. I can see a change to the title here, and as I hover over this on the right-hand side, I see it's Karen Leslie, 18 minutes ago; change it to a Title style, Left, and if I click inside it anywhere, that stays open on the right-hand side in the reviewing pane. Now, as the author, I get to choose whether or not I want to accept or reject this change. So I'll go to the Review tab, Track Changes is turned on, and in the Changes section now, I can choose if I'm going to accept it, or reject it. Clicking the dropdown, I have some other options as well. The default, by clicking this button, will accept the change, and move on to the next change in the document. I can select it from here as well, or just to accept this change, and allow me to review the document move through it at my own pace. I can accept all changes if I trust this person; accept all changes, and even turn tracking off. So I'm going to just simply click the button at the top to accept it, and move on to the next. Now you can see it's actually here on page 3, and they've made the change that I was thinking would be a good change. I'm going to accept that one too. If I want to reject, I can click the dropdown to reject and move to next, reject the change, all changes, etcetera, just like we saw for accepting. So I should probably accept, since it was my idea anyway. It moves on to the next word here, customers; I'll Accept that too, as well as the lowercase c, and the s on the end. Now when I click Accept, it moves on to the next, which is some formatting. I see the end result here, it's highlighted, and in balloons over here on the right-hand side in the reviewing pane, I see what was done to this text. So if I click in the first one, which is Font: Bold, Italic, just click in that one all by itself, you can see they're both separate changes, and I can accept or reject one or the other. I'm going to Accept one, and Reject the other one. You can see what happens; there aren't any more comments, or tracked changes in my document. I'll click OK, and I'm done. The reviewing pane disappears, and I've either accepted or rejected every single change that was made to this document with tracking turned on. So it's a great way for the owner of a document to get collaboration on a document, but have the final word over what that document will look like by accepting or rejecting changes that have been tracked.

Contents