Video: Incorporate revisions with track changes

Let’s say you’re the original writer of a document, and you’re reviewing changes suggested by others. As you go through the document, you decide what you want to do with the comments and changes – accept or reject them, either individually, or all at once.

Remove tracked changes

• The only way to get tracked changes out of a document is to accept or reject them. Choosing No Markup in the Display for Review box helps you see what the final document will look like, but it only hides tracked changes temporarily. The changes are not deleted, and they’ll show up again the next time anyone opens the document.

• To delete the tracked changes permanently, accept or reject them. Click REVIEW > Next > Accept or Reject. Word accepts the change, or removes it, and then moves to the next change.

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Learn all about tracking changes in Word

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Let’s say you are the original writer of a document, and you are reviewing changes suggested by others.

This is what you see when you open the document.

You can click a line to show the changes, or you can go to the REVIEW tab, click the arrow next to Display for Review, and choose another option.

All Markup shows all changes, Simple Markup is the same as clicking a line to hide changes, No Markup shows you what the document would look like, with all the changes in place, and Original shows your original document with no changes.

As you go through the document, you decide what you want to do with the comments and changes.

When you make an edit, your markup appears in a different color.

Word automatically chooses a color for each reviewer.

Change anything you want, including the changes from the other person.

If the markup looks confusing, click the line to show Simple Markup.

When you are done editing the changes, you finalize the document by removing the comments and markup.

It is not enough to simply click No Markup, because that only hides it. The markup is still there.

To make it go away permanently, you need to go through the document, and Accept, or Reject changes.

Select All Markup, then, press Ctrl+Home to move the cursor to the very beginning of the document.

Now click Next, and the first change is selected.

Decide what you want to do with the change, and click either Accept or Reject, and the selection moves to the next change. Decide what you want to do with this change, and you move to the next one.

You can continue this way through the whole document, or click the arrow under to Accept or Reject, and choose an option.

You can accept or reject a change, and not move to the next one.

You can simply accept or reject all changes in the document, or accept or reject all changes and stop track changes.

This last option turns off Track Changes, accepts all changes, and removes the markup.

Now when you type in the document, your changes aren’t tracked.

The last thing to do is remove comments. You can right-click a comment to delete it.

Or go to the Comments group, click the arrow under Delete and Delete all comments in Document with one click.

So now, you have the basics of reviewing the comments and track changes.

But the process of reviewing can get pretty complicated, especially when you review input from many sources.

Up next, you’ll see how tracking changes online can make the job much easier with multiple people.