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About this lesson
Track changes will show which person made which changes in a document.
Quick reference
Track Changes
Track changes will show which person made which changes in a document.
When to use
Use any time an edit is optional and someone must give final approval. Commonly used for contract documents and often in legal offices.
Instructions
Review Ribbon, Tracking & Changes Group
Track Changes
- Turn on Track Changes by clicking the Track Changes button on the Review ribbon.
- Make changes to the document; observe the marks on the screen. Change how many markups you see by switching “Simple Markup” to “All Markup”.
- To view the changes in a pane rather than on the actual document screen, click Reviewing Pane and choose Vertical or Horizontal.
- Click the Dialogue Box operator on the Tracking group
- Make any changes, then click “Advanced Options” to change the markup colors and options:
- When finalizing a document, click the Accept/Reject buttons and the markup lines in the left margin will disappear.
- The last step is to turn off the Track Changes button so that it will stop all future tracking.
- 00:04 Under the Review ribbon over on the right-hand side,
- 00:07 is a process called Tracking where we track changes.
- 00:10 Well, this is one of the most confusing and
- 00:12 confounding things about Microsoft Word and
- 00:14 it frustrates a lot of people because they don't know the other side of it.
- 00:18 Once you track changes, those changes must be accepted or deleted.
- 00:24 If they're never accepted or deleted, they will forever show on this document and
- 00:29 that's what makes people a little crazy.
- 00:31 The tracking and the changes go hand in hand.
- 00:35 Okay, let's go ahead and make some changes and show you how to do this.
- 00:39 On the Tracking group, notice we have a Tracking Changes with a drop down arrow.
- 00:43 The top button will actually activate the Track Changes.
- 00:46 Notice the tooltip says Ctrl Shift E.
- 00:49 As soon as I activate Track Changes, whatever I do next will be marked.
- 00:54 Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and click Track Changes.
- 00:57 Notice a couple of things happen.
- 00:59 This immediately switched to All Markup, and
- 01:02 suddenly my Show Comments lit up as well.
- 01:05 Let's go down here.
- 01:06 I will retype, instead of my I'll re type sender.
- 01:10 It chose the new word with red underline, the previous words crossed out and
- 01:14 have a little gray mark in the left hand side.
- 01:16 I'll change the address.
- 01:22 The new words are underline, previous words crossed out, gray mark.
- 01:26 Let's change one more.
- 01:30 Okay, that's enough for the example.
- 01:33 The way to finish this, of course, is to come over to the Accept button,
- 01:38 Accept and Move to Next, Accept This Change, Accept All Changes, or
- 01:43 the creme de la creme, Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking.
- 01:47 You see, that's another problem.
- 01:48 Once tracking is on, oftentimes people forget to get up there and turn it off.
- 01:54 Well, at this point, if this is a long document we're tracking a bunch of
- 01:58 changes, it gets a little confusing seeing the cross outs and the new ones and
- 02:02 everything in red.
- 02:03 So, under this option where it says All Markup,
- 02:06 I can click the drop down arrow and choose Simple Markup.
- 02:09 Now, I have got bright red lines in the margin, but
- 02:13 at least I can just see the new words.
- 02:15 Hit the drop down again choose No Markup.
- 02:18 Okay, now it looks like it's finished, doesn't it?
- 02:21 Except that that Track Changes is still lit up so I know that's on.
- 02:25 Let's hit this one more time.
- 02:26 Check this one out, Original.
- 02:29 You can click Original and click No Markup and
- 02:33 you can see the original compared to the new one.
- 02:36 I'm going to change this back to Simple Markup because I like to
- 02:39 know that there's actually tracking turned on and
- 02:42 these red lines in the margin is always my indicator that tracking is on right now.
- 02:46 Before we finish this I want to show you a couple more things.
- 02:49 I want to show you how to see the markups in balloons which will make you
- 02:54 a little crazy.
- 02:55 But notice, I've got Balloons checked, Show Revisions in Balloons but
- 02:59 I'm not seeing anything different because it is still on Simple Markup.
- 03:02 So I hit the dropdown, choose All Markup, and now we have a brand new panel with
- 03:07 all of the markups on a separate column and all of these lines on the screen.
- 03:12 And a lot of people get into this mode and then don't know how to turn it off.
- 03:16 It's just a matter of getting into the Tracking and clicking the dropdowns,
- 03:21 finding every possible solution, and now the result is Show All Revisions inline.
- 03:27 That's how to turn off the balloons.
- 03:29 Notice we also have a Reviewing Pane.
- 03:32 When I turn that on, look at the left-hand side, brand new panel right over there.
- 03:36 And I've got a drop-down arrow as well, showing Review Pane Vertical or
- 03:41 Review Pane Horizontal.
- 03:42 I prefer the vertical.
- 03:46 And then when we're done with that, we can turn that off as well.
- 03:49 Okay, there's a way to actually change the font color for everyone that authors or
- 03:54 edits this.
- 03:55 On the dialog box operator in the corner of the Tracking, open that up, and
- 03:59 as you can see, we can show Ink, Insertions, Deletions, Formatting,
- 04:04 Balloons, Reviewing Pane, or Advanced Options.
- 04:07 And this is where we can change color by author.
- 04:11 So every person who's going to author this will have a certain color code.
- 04:15 I once saw a document where the final printout was only 15 pages black and
- 04:19 white, but they showed all the tracking changes and sent it to the printer and
- 04:23 it was a 40 page document.
- 04:25 There were that many authors in it, it was a little confusing.
- 04:29 I'll hit Cancel on this and Cancel on this.
- 04:31 All right, well, I already gave it away in the beginning.
- 04:33 How do we finish this?
- 04:34 We must accept or delete the changes.
- 04:38 So I can hit the drop down, Reject and Move to Next, Reject Change,
- 04:42 Reject All Changes, Reject All Changes and Stop Tracking.
- 04:46 I prefer to accept.
- 04:48 I'm going to hit the drop down and come right down to Accept All the Changes,
- 04:53 Stop the Tracking, click.
- 04:54 The Tracking button went off on its own.
- 04:57 The All Markup is right here and notice there is no markup showing.
- 05:01 So that's the trick folks.
- 05:03 When you're doing tracking there's two sides of the story.
- 05:05 Turn it on, but then accept everything and turn it off.
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