I write. A lot. And I sometimes share what I write with other people who might revise what’s written.
Conversely, I might review things that other people write.
Whichever the case may be, I tend to work onscreen as much as possible. (If I work on paper, transmitting reviews back and forth becomes a longer chore than it needs to be.) That’s why, when the document to be reviewed is a word processor file, I use the track changes tool.
I track three things in documents:
- deletions
- additions
- comments about the content
Together, these things are known as markup.
In Microsoft Word, I use the Cmd-Shift-E keyboard shortcut to automatically track deletions and additions. There’s no default keyboard shortcut for comments, so I created one using my Mac’s Keyboard system preferences. This is handy since you can create comments in Excel and PowerPoint as well as Word, so I created one system-wide shortcut that works in all three programs.
A note of caution: you can view documents with markup or without. Some programs call this view “final.” I don’t use “final” view since I would not want to submit any document that contains markup I haven’t dealt with. Were I to view documents regularly in “final” view, I might accidentally send out comments or corrections that I would not want other people to see.
And a tip: Track Changes tracks any formatting changes you make. Since there’s usually little sense in tracking format changes, turn off Track Changes before you change a format, then turn it back on when you change content.
Here’s a quick video that explains Track Changes in Microsoft Word:
And here’s a video that explains change tracking in Apple Pages: