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About this lesson
Track changes will show which person made which changes in a document.
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Word documents from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Track Changes.docx128.9 KB Track Changes - Solution.docx
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Quick reference
Track Changes
Track changes will show which person made which changes in a document.
When to use
Any time an edit change is “optional” and someone must give final approval. Commonly used in legal offices.
Instructions
Review Ribbon, Tracking & Changes Group
Track Changes
- Turn on Track Changes by clicking the button on the Review ribbon.
- Make changes to the ribbon; 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 colours and options:
- When finalizing a document, click the Accept/Reject buttons and the markup lines in the left margin will disappear.
- And the last step is to finally turn “off” the Track Changes button so that it will stop all future tracking.
ON:OFF:
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- 00:00 The tracking changes feature in Microsoft Word is pretty great especially
- 00:05 if your in a legal office, and you've got multiple people reviewing a document,
- 00:11 but you have to keep track of who made the changes.
- 00:14 So lets go ahead and get started, we have a sample document right here, and I'm on
- 00:19 a review written and here's the track changes portion that there's two sections,
- 00:23 there's tracking and then there's accepting and rejecting those changes.
- 00:28 All right, so we're gonna start with tracking.
- 00:30 Notice it is off because this button is not lit up.
- 00:33 So changes are not being tracked.
- 00:35 I could change anything I wanted, and there would be no record of it.
- 00:38 So the first mission, is to turn that button on.
- 00:41 When it's on it turns blue and so now, whatever I do,
- 00:44 whatever I type will be tracked.
- 00:46 So, I'm gonna go ahead and type my name here and notice what's happening.
- 00:51 It shows you what's been crossed out, and this is being underlined my name.
- 00:55 It's also giving a line over here in the margin.
- 00:58 This is because by default, the All Markup is on there, but
- 01:03 if I change it to Simple Markup, now it just shows me a red mark and the line, and
- 01:08 so the next things I change I'll just have little red marks on the sidelines.
- 01:13 So I'm gonna go ahead and make some changes.
- 01:16 When you've made a bunch of changes you do have these red marks that's just your
- 01:19 indicator that changes were made on that particular line.
- 01:22 I can come up to the tracking changes group, I can hit the drop down and
- 01:26 see all the mark up I can change it to No Markup so it all vanishes, or
- 01:31 I can change it back to the original.
- 01:33 Now it flips back to the original because I have not accepted or
- 01:36 rejected these changes.
- 01:38 So it still lets me go back to the original.
- 01:41 I'm gonna switch that to, I guess just Simple Markup and show you another option.
- 01:45 We have the Show Markup so this'll show me comments, ink, insertions,
- 01:49 formatting, the balloons or
- 01:51 callout's off to the side if I made any comments, or specific people.
- 01:56 If there's a list of multiple authors I can just see this persons changes and
- 02:00 not everyone elses.
- 02:02 Another thing is, a reviewing pane.
- 02:03 The reviewing pane can be seen vertically off to the left.
- 02:07 So, instead of showing the changes on the screen,
- 02:10 I'll just show them off to the side.
- 02:11 I also the have the option just to show viewing pane horizontal.
- 02:16 Now the viewing pane is on when it's blue, so just click it once and it turns off.
- 02:21 Now on the tracking group there happens to be a little dialogue box operator.
- 02:24 When you click this you have a bunch more options in here that you can turn all
- 02:28 these on or off.
- 02:29 I can show balloons, I can show markings.
- 02:32 I can hit the Reviewing pane off or on, your choice, but
- 02:36 under Advanced Options, look at this.
- 02:38 You can actually change the colors that you wanna use, and
- 02:42 I have seen five, six, seven different colors of authors in a document.
- 02:47 I once received a document that was 15 pages long, and when we hit, let me close
- 02:52 all this, when we hit the all markup and printed, it printed out 40 pages.
- 02:58 There were so many changes in there, it was crazy.
- 03:01 It was best just to go back to the original, or just show no markup and
- 03:05 print the final one, it was crazy.
- 03:07 All right, let's go ahead and quickly accept these changes.
- 03:10 I'll go ahead and show all markup.
- 03:12 I'll click on this one and I've decided that I want to accept and move to next, or
- 03:16 I can accept just this change, or I can accept all changes.
- 03:20 I'll go ahead and accept and move to next and look what happened.
- 03:23 It turned it from red underline to just regular underline.
- 03:26 All right so now the next one, I'm gonna accept and move to next, and let's see.
- 03:32 I guess I can accept that one, and
- 03:35 I'm expecting them to turn to black text and then these lines disappear.
- 03:40 Now I might want to reject that one.
- 03:41 So I can reject it.
- 03:43 Reject that one.
- 03:43 So it's up to you just to click through Accept,
- 03:45 Reject, go to Previous, go to Next, and you can skip around.
- 03:49 The final thing that really trips people up is you'll receive a document,
- 03:55 it'll have all this markup on it, and you won't know why.
- 03:59 So, you'll come into Review and you'll turn off Track Changes.
- 04:02 You'll see this is on O, and you'll think,
- 04:04 oh they just forgot to turn it off, I'll just click it and turn that off, and
- 04:08 yet, all the markup is still on there, and it frustrates people, and
- 04:12 they don't know how to get past it, because of this box right here.
- 04:16 You have to know to come in here, and finally show no markup.
- 04:20 When I click that now it looks like a normal document.
- 04:23 Okay, so If it was ever, if changes were ever tracked even though this is off,
- 04:29 they may not have turned the This saw.
- 04:31 Okay?
- 04:32 So, just so you know that.
- 04:34 Set it to no mark up, and you are in business and ready to go.
- 04:37 I hope that helps you, and I hope you're just a little smarter now when it comes to
- 04:41 using track changes in Microsoft Word.
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