The following is from a series of articles written by Woody Leonhard for Woody's Office for Mere Mortals. The articles have been edited to make this a shorter document and pull out the important information. If you want to read the full articles they are available at Woody's Office for Mere Mortals. Links to Woody's articles are listed at the bottom of this page. Woody has a great conversational writing style and you may find it enjoyable to read the comments we left out.

1. Tracking changes in Word 97 and 2000
2. Comments
3. Protecting a document
4. Names control edit markings
5. Compare documents - a warning

TRACKING CHANGES IN WORD 97 AND 2000

When you find yourself editing a Word document, as sole author or collaborating with others, you should consider using Word's Track Changes editing tool. This is much easier than keeping multiple copies of a document, or relying on Word's Undo key.

A quick way to turn on the track changes feature is to double-click the little grayed-out button that says "TRK", on the status bar at the bottom of Word's screen. You could also use click Tools | Track Changes | Highlight Changes, then check the box marked "Track changes while editing".

By default, each editor's changes will appear in a different color, but you can change these settings under
Tools | Options | Track Changes
The default options you'll find are:

- Added text is underlined and colored by author.
- Deleted text has strikethrough and is colored by author.
- Formatting changes are not marked.
- Any text lines containing edits are marked with a vertical bar in the left margin.

COMMENTS

Use comments to make notes or suggestions anywhere in a document's text. Text in the document is tied to the comment, so you don't have to hunt around to see which comment goes where. If you move the text, the comment goes with it. To use comments select the part of the document you want to comment about, then click Insert | Comment. The commented part of the document appears highlighted in yellow.

Hovering the cursor over the commented part shows you the comment and the initials of the author who made the comment and the comment number.

Alternatively, you can click on View | Comments, and the Comments appear at the bottom of the screen in the Comments pane.

You can also use the Reviewing toolbar to manipulate the comments. Display the toolbar using View | Toolbars | Reviewing. The options on the toolbar for comments are:

• Insert comment
• Edit comment
• Previous comment
• Next comment
• Delete comment

PROTECTING A DOCUMENT

Protect your document if you want to let other people make comments, or suggest changes, but you don't want them to change the document itself until you've had a chance to go through the edits and weigh each one. Click on Tools | Protect Document to see the two options, "Tracked changes" and "Comments".

The Tracked Changes option will allow other users to make changes to the document, tracking and marking the changes, keeping the original intact.

The Comments option will only allow other users to add comments to the document; but not allow them to change the contents of the document.

The "Protect document" setting isn't intended to be high-class security. It's there to ensure that reasonably co-operative editors don't clobber your prose without your permission. Anybody who has your document can turn off the "Protect document" setting by clicking Tools | Unprotect document. (If you provided a password in the original "Protect document for:" dialog box, the person attempting to Unprotect the document will be prompted for a password. But they can easily bypass that, too, by simply copying all of the contents of the document into a new document.

NAMES CONTROL EDIT MARKINGS
When you track changes Word has an elaborate color-coding scheme that runs in conjunction with track changes. Unless you go in and change things, Word will mark all of the edits performed by one person with a distinct color. If Rick adds text here and deletes some there, his additions might appear in red (formatted underlined), and his deletions would appear in red (formatted strikethrough). Then if Doug runs through and makes changes, his changes will be marked in blue. And so on. Word makes a brave effort to keep the color-coding consistent, so edits performed by Rick today are in red, and edits performed by Rick on the same document next month will also be in red.

In each document that's being tracked for changes, Word maintains a little table. You can't see it or change it, but it's there just the same. The table lists the names of the people who have performed edits on the document, and the color each person has been assigned. (Colors are assigned in order, depending on who edits first, second, third, and so on.)

The names of the people doing the editing are pulled from the Tools | Options | User Information | Name box. Usually that name is filled in by Word when you install the program. if you don't provide a name in the Tools | Options | User Information | Name box, Word won't know what to call you - and it won't be smart enough to give you a new color in the color-coding scheme.

You can change your own name, in the Tools | Options | User Information | Name box, to force Word to start using a new color when tracking changes. That can be really handy if you need to edit a document two (or more) times, and you want to keep track of which changes were made when. For example, you might run a pass through a document on copyedit - picking up bad grammar and the like. Then you might run another pass looking for figure cross-references. If you change your name in between passes, it's quite easy to use Word's built-in revision tracking tools to, say, double-check all the changed figure numbers, without bothering with grammar.

COMPARE DOCUMENTS - A WARNING
Word has a similar feature called "Compare Documents" (Tools | Track Changes | Compare Documents). If you run a compare between two documents, Word will note all the differences between the documents, using tracked changes, just as we have described here. It works, but it only works if you compare two "clean" documents - that is, two documents that don't have outstanding tracked changes inside of them.

Make sure that you've gone through both of the documents in a "compare" and accepted or rejected every change BEFORE you run the compare. Why? Because Word can hit all sorts of situations where the comparison doesn't mean anything.

An example. Say your original document contained the sentence:

John wants to diversify his holdings.

Now say that one of your editors/reviewers came along, with Word set up to track changes, and modified the sentence to say:

John and Mary want to diversify their holdings.

Finally, say that the other copy of the document - the one that you're going to compare this modified document to - has the sentence deleted completely.

On the one hand, Word has a sentence with unresolved tracked changes. On the other hand, Word is comparing that document to one where the sentence no longer exists. How does Word show all the changes? Not very well - if at all.

Track changes and compare documents aren't compatible. You'll only end up with a headache.

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