You edit a shared document, send it back, and then explain in a message what you changed: a number on page two, a sentence in the summary, a date at the end. The reviewer has to hunt for each one, and if you forget to mention a change, it slips through.
Track Changes marks the edits for you.
TL;DR: Turn on Track Changes from the Review tab for all users, edit as usual, then use Accept > Accept All Changes when the review is done.
Steps
- Open the Review tab, click Track Changes, and choose the option that tracks everyone's edits.
- Edit the document. In the example, a number was changed. New text appears underlined in red, deleted text is struck through, and a mark appears in the left margin next to the changed line.
- When the review is finished, open Accept and choose Accept All Changes. The markup disappears and only the edited text remains.
Checked in the free Word for the web.
Turn it on first
Edits made before tracking is on leave no trace. In the example, a value changed from 30 to 50 before tracking was switched on, and nothing showed that it had changed. If a document is going out for review, switch tracking on before you touch anything.
When to use it
- Contracts, proposals and policies where every wording change matters.
- Documents passed between several people, where each person's edits should stay visible.
- Any time you would otherwise write "here's what I changed" in a message.
Common mistakes
- Sending a document with markup still in it. Accept or reject everything before the final version goes out, so the recipient doesn't get the edit history.
- Accepting everything without reading. Accept All Changes is fast, but it accepts every change. For a document someone else edited, step through the changes first.
- Turning tracking off by accident. If edits stop being marked, check the Track Changes button on the Review tab.
Compared with version control
For developers, this is the closest thing Word has to a diff with a review step: visible changes, then an explicit decision to merge them. The tooling around it is thinner, though. python-docx, for example, has no API for reading or accepting tracked changes, so if your pipeline processes Word files, settle the edits in Word before the document goes back into code.
Drafted with an AI assistant and checked against the original walkthrough in Word for the web.
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