Microsoft Word isn’t just for composing documents by yourself. If you know exactly how to track changes in Word, it becomes perfect for collaborating on files with your colleagues because any amendments will be highlighted and be far easier to spot. Track changes is an essential tool for editors to use as this will allow your clients to see what you’ve changed in your document so that they can decide whether or not to accept or reject them.

This, in turn, offers up a platform on which to review others’ changes, suggest edits of your own as well as even comment on particular passages. In this guide, we’ll demonstrate how all of these Track Changes features in Word.

While you can utilise the Track Changes tool in order to leave notes for yourself, it’s mainly designed for collaborating on documents with a number of different authors. You can either save a copy of a document with tracked changes incorporated, which you can then email or otherwise share, or just leave your changes in a cloud storage copy that all authors can access at once.

In this article, I look at how to turn track changes on and off as well as how you can hide your track changes

• Click on the Review tab which is situated in the ribbon at the top of your screen.
• Click on the Track Changes button which is located in the Tracking group. The button will look darker than the rest of the ribbon when you turn on Track Changes.
• Click on the Track Changes button again to turn off tracking.

You are able to control how comments and edits appear through utilising the ‘Display for Review’ and ‘Show Markup’ menus that are to be found in the Tracking group in the ribbon.

Choose the ‘Display for Review’ drop-down menu in order to choose how edits and comments are shown. The options are (1) Simple Markup, (2) All Markup, (3) No Markup, as well as (4) Original:

1. Simple Markup shows the edited version of the content without noticeable in-line edits. However, edits are shown by a vertical line in the left margin. For instance, if you delete a sentence, that sentence won’t be visible on screen. Rather, a vertical line will appear in the left margin demonstrating that a change was made in that place. If you want to see the edit, click on the vertical line in order to switch to All Markup.

2. All Markup presents all edits and comments. This view is best for most copy editing and proofreading work. A vertical line will appear on the left side of the screen showing that an alteration was made in that location. Select that line in order to switch to Simple Markup.

3. No Markup shows the edited version of the content without any visible edits or comments.

4. Original shows the original version of the content devoid of any edits or comments. Click on the Show Markup drop-down menu to select which features Track Changes displays.

I recommend showing all comments and edits (i.e., insertions, deletions and formatting changes) and selecting Show Only Comments – as well as Formatting in Balloons – for most copy-editing and proofreading work so that your insertions, alterations and deletions will appear in the text.

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