Customizing Comments and Revisions Tracking in Microsoft Word

10.07.08

Total posts: 2

No one uses comments and revisions tracking because they're fun. So how can you make these workplace tools work better for you?

by Neil Randall

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If you collaborate on documents, you already know that Word's reviewing features—Comment and Track Changes—are vital tools. But you don't have to accept the default configurations for these tools. With a few clicks, you can customize them to your liking.




To begin, click Review in the menu bar to reveal the Review bar. Highlight a word and click New Comment, then type a comment. By default, Word uses the Calibri typeface in comments, but you can change this just as you would with regular text, in the Font slab of the Home ribbon. For a permanent change, modify the style called Comment Text: On the Home bar, click the small expansion icon on the bottom right of the Styles section, and click the Manage Styles icon at bottom middle of the resulting Styles window. Scroll to the Comment Text entry and double-click to bring up the Modify Style dialog. Make your change to the typeface, and click OK. Your comments will now appear in that typeface.





If you used the options available in the Home tab to change the typeface of a single comment and want to update the style, you can change Comment Text by right-clicking on the comment in the Reviewing Pane, then choosing Styles | Update Comment Text to Match Selection.

Better Revision Tracking

Word's Track Changes feature shows you not only everything that's been changed in the document by other collaborators but also everything you change as you type. Toggling the feature on is a simple matter of clicking the Track Changes icon on the Review bar, but you don't have to accept the default configuration—you can customize it in numerous useful ways.

Before diving in to the customizations, I need to address an odd decision Microsoft made with Word 2007. Users of previous versions may have been used to clicking the small TRK icon in the status bar at the bottom of the Word window. One click to track changes, one click to stop—convenient. To get that function back, right-click on the status bar and click Track Changes.





You have several options for displaying changes within a document, and most people find they have a definite preference. Decide whether you want your changes to appear inline (in the text itself), in a separate reviewing pane, or as balloons outside the text. If the last, you can have all revisions appear in balloons or only your formatting changes and your comments. To toggle the Reviewing Pane on and off, click the Reviewing Pane item on the Review bar; click its down arrow to switch between a vertical (left-side) or a horizontal (along the bottom) pane.




Revisions shown inline.




Comments in the reviewing pane.




Comments and revisions shown in balloons.




Revisions shown inline, comments shown in balloons.

No matter where your edits and comments appear, you can act on them identically: Right-click the edit in the balloon, the Reviewing Pane, or the text, and accept or reject the change. (A very unfortunate change in Word 2007 is the elimination of the plain old Accept and Reject buttons; clicking on Accept or Reject performs the chosen action and then moves on to the next revision. To avoid moving on, you must click the arrow next to the button. It's a whole procedure; I find right-clicking easier.)

The most generally overlooked set of customizations appears under the Show Markup item on the Review bar. Clicking this item reveals a list of items you can include or exclude in your document when reviewing is turned on. Most are immediately clear: You can show—or decline to show—comments, insertions and deletions, and formatting changes. You can remove the vertical highlight (the shaded area) in the markup area on the right side of the screen. The other two items are less obvious. The first lets you show or hide Ink annotations (made by a stylus on a tablet PC). And the bottom choice, Reviewers, is the most useful. As collaborators change the document, it can fill with text and annotations of various colors; Reviewers lets you hide the comments from whichever reviewers you wish, letting you zero in on the work of specific collaborators. You can even check one or more reviewers and then use the rest of the Show Markup menu to display only specific types of markups from them.





Clicking the Track Changes label below the icon and then choosing Change Tracking Options gives you access to a wide range of options. By default, for example, Track Changes displays each insertion with an underline and each deletion with a strikethrough, but you can make either or both of these bold, italic, or double underlines instead or simply display it in a specific color. Also by default, text that you move from one location to another in the document is displayed with a double strikethrough at its origin point and a double underline at its destination, but you can change these designations as well, including hiding the original (useful with large text moves, which otherwise can make the document nearly unreadable). Moved text also appears in green by default, but a drop-down menu lets you customize the color for both the original text and the text once it's moved.





Finally, several options are available to you at print time. Near the bottom left of Word's Print dialog is a drop-down menu labeled Print what:. Clicking here reveals two options tied to the reviewing features. Document Showing Markup prints your document with all the changes you've tracked. List of Markup prints only the changes made in the document and the username of the person who made each change, without any context.

Word's reviewing features are powerful. But with numerous collaborators your documents can become difficult to read and interpret. Using the numerous customization features lets you select only the features you need.




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