Welcome to this video.
My name is Jason Morrell and today I'm going to show you the Tracking and Comments feature
in Microsoft Word and try and demystify this strange, confusing creature that it is.
You may have had documents in the past where you've done some work and some strange things
have happened to the document.
You get weird formatting happening like this.
You get some markings in the left margin like this.
What is it all about?
This is actually tracking in action.
What I want to do is explain why this happens and how can use this tracking feature to your
advantage.
Let me close this document down and let's start with a brand new one.
I'm going to type a simple statement and this will give us some sample text to work with.
First of all, the idea of tracking changes is that you've written a document and you
want to get feedback and comments from other people before you finalise it and send it
out or distribute it.
Now, what Tracking Changes lets you do is to make the changes directly on the document
itself and let's say you send this out to ten different people, all those people can
make the changes on the same document and it records who made the change and what they
said.
At the end of the process, you, as the documents creator can then go through and actually say,
well, this is a good comment.
I'm going to take some action on that, or yeah, this proposed change is good, I'm going
to accept it, or maybe it's not so good in which case you reject it.
So you have the choice at the end of the process as to what to do with the feedback that's
come back.
Changes fall into three main categories.
There's changes to the content itself.
There's formatting changes and there's comments.
The comments aren't already part of the Tracking Changes process, but it works in together.
With a new document, your tracking is turned off as a default setting, so to turn the tracking
on you need to go to the Review tab at the top of your screen.
Find the Track Changes button there, and it's actually a split icon.
So if you click the top half there, the picture, it turns the tracking on for you.
If you choose the second half, the dropdown section, you get two choices.
You can either track the changes, turn in on, or you can lock the tracking.
That means turn the Track Changes feature on and you can only switch it off if you have
the password.
So for this one let's just chose Track Changes.
Tracking is now on, which means any changes we make will get recorded.
There are three types of change.
You can either add stuff, remove stuff or change stuff.
Let's do an example of each.
So, let's say I come down here, I'll press ENTER for new line and type some new text.
You can see there's a marking in the left-hand margin there and it always adds one of these
marks to indicate that somewhere along this line there's been a change.
In this case, that's new text, so it's new content, stuff that's been added, and it marks
that with an underline.
If we select a sentence here and delete it, again, it puts the marking in the left-hand
margin, but this time the scores through the text and that indicates that the texts it's
going to get removed, if this change is accepted later on.
The final type is a change.
So let's say we take this word 'coordinated' and let's replace it with 'in check'.
So you can see the original word is struck through.
The new content is underlined, which indicates it's new content.
Other types of content you may add into your document at some point are tables and images.
Let's say we add (or insert) a table, any size is fine.
Again, the marking down the left-hand side.
If you look closely at the table, you'll see the cells are coloured light blue, and that's
the colour that's used to indicate new content or new cells in your table.
Later on, if you decide to delete some columns or rows or cells or you insert some new ones
or you merge cells or split cells - all of those kinds of actions on a table have different
colour coding, and I'll show you where to change that bit later on.
Let's add an image, so under Insert, Pictures, any image is fine.
Let's resize it.
Now, when I click away from a picture, can you see the red underline underneath the picture
there.
Now, just like for new text, this is indicating that the picture is new content, it's been
added since the review process started and again in the left-hand margin, the marker
just like before.
So that's content.
Let's now look at some formatting changes, so let's go to the top here.
Let's choose maybe a couple of words and make it bold, or maybe we turn the highlighter
on, choose a word or a phrase and highlight it.
Now all of these kinds of things, these are formatting changes and you'll notice they're
actually indicated a little bit differently to content changes so where the content was
actually marked inline, any comments or any formatting changes are included in balloons,
that's the official name for these entries over here.
Now you can actually change the way each of those is displayed, if you wanted to.
If you come back to the Review tab and click the Show Markup, it gives you some options.
Now firstly it's just saying, do you want to mark up the comments,
anything you insert or delete or anything you format, so all those are ticked so all
of those are going to get marked up in some way.
Where it says Balloons, you can come across here and there's an option that says, 'Show
all revisions in balloons', balloons being the stuff down the right hand side there.
So if instead of showing the markup on the content itself, you can actually say, look,
show it in balloons instead, so it looks like this.
The original document remains clean, but all the comments and all the feedback that's given
appears on the right hand side, but everything is in balloons.
The other option under Show Markup and Balloons is to show all revisions inline.
That includes any formatting changes that may have happened, but the default is to show
only the comments and formatting and balloons and any content changes inline.
Tere's also an option here for specific people.
Now at the moment there's only one person that's had any sort of input into this document,
but maybe eventually it's going to go around, say, ten or fifteen different people, all
of whom are going to input in some sort of way.
Let me close this for a second.
Let's go to this thing here called a Launcher, then change User Name and I'm going to make
this one.
Fred Smith, initials F, S. And OK that.
So now let's say I make some sort of other change, so maybe I'll choose the sentence
here and delete it.
You'll see how the colour-coding is now different.
This colour-code is a new colour that belongs to Fred Smith.
If you come to where it says Show Marker and Specific People, you'll see two people listed
now, Joe Bloggs and Fred Smith.
Each one has a tick box next to it, which means if you untick the people you don't want
to see at this moment, it only shows the feedback from the people that are still ticked.
In this case that one comment from Fred Smith is the only thing is now showing on the document.
So this is a way for you to filter down comments that you're looking at.
So maybe there's a person on your list of ten who you have a load of respect for, they
always come back with good feedback and you want to look at their comments and feedback
first.
And once you've done all that you can then look at everybody else's and see if there's
anything else that is worth including.
It's that kind of situation.
So under Show Markup, Specific People, this is a way to filter down person by person or
group by group.
So I've just turned all the feedback back on.
Next in the group here is Reviewing Pane.
You can either show the Reviewing Pane Horizontal, which means that it appears down the bottom,
or Vertical, which means that appears on the left hand sidebar there.
Now this is a summary of all the changes that have been proposed.
A sequential list of the changes.
So in the document, all the changes we made here are on the same page because it's only
a small sample we're looking at, but in the real world you might have say a hundred page
document.
The first change might be on page one, the next change might be on page twelve or twenty
five or fifty.
So there's these huge gaps in between these changes.
The advantage of using this Reviewing Pane is everything that is listed sequentially
just as a list so you can scan through it and see what has been changed.
So you can turn this on or off at any point.
The last option in this group is the All Markup at the top there.
The proper name for that is called Display For Review and 'All Markup' is the default
option.
All Markup means it shows all the inline content changes with a marking on the left-hand border
there, plus any balloons for your feedback or comments.
If you want to simplify the markup a little bit is one option here called 'Simple Markup'
and it removes all the changes in the inline content itself, but it's still indicated quite
clearly with a mark on the left there to say that there's been some sort of change on this
line.
Other options here, say 'Original' so this throws you back to the original text before
any changes were proposed in case you want to check it for something and 'No Markup',
the old name for this was 'Final', and it shows how the document would look right now
if you were to accept all the currently proposed changes.
So I'm going to change that to 'All Markup', go back to how we were.
One thing I haven't touched on yet is the comments.
Now, Comments are a standalone feature but they work with Tracking Changes quite nicely.
They're often used together.
Before I show you how this works, let me quickly go back to the 'Show Markup' option and just
show only the comments in formatting balloons, because the comments are going to appear down
here in balloons.
So let's say I choose a paragraph down here and I go to New Comment and click and it's
given me a space now to put my comment.
So I might say something like, "Maybe shorten this paragraph".
So comments can be used to kind of suggest things, bring attention to things, all that
kind of stuff and it's up to you at the end of the day whether you act on these comments
or not.
You'll notice that the comments have a Reply button next to them.
So once somebody has made a comment, somebody else might chime in with something to add
to that or to clarify something or to add a bit of weight behind it to say yes, this
is important.
It's all of those kinds of things.
So what you get is the original comment and then lots of people chipping in to further
that conversation.
So let's imagine now that the document has been around all the people, it's come back
to you and there's all these kind of feedback and different comments that people have made
throughout the document.
You now have to decide which bits you want to accept, which bits you want to reject,
and also take into account any comments that have been made and take action where appropriate.
So first of all, the Changes group here.
This is to do with the feedback only, the Tracking only.
It doesn't take into account the comments.
Your two main options here to either accept or reject each proposed change.
The other two buttons here navigate between each change, so wherever you happen to be,
this one will show the next change that's been proposed.
This one will show the previous change that was proposed.
So lets say I press CTRL HOME go back to the top of the document.
That way we'll be starting from the top and working through.
We then click the Next Change and it highlights the first change in the document.
Now I'm looking at that sentence and thinking, no, I don't want it to delete that.
So on this first one I might reject that change.
So under the Reject button (the drop down) I'm going to reject just that change.
You will see there are other options there to reject all the changes in the document
as well.
In this case, just the one.
If I then click Next Change, it then highlights the next thing that was changed.
In his case it's just a formatting change and I might say, OK, that's fine, so let's
accept that and move on to the next one.
The next one is a highlighting change.
I don't want to do that, so let's reject it.
Now let's say I scan through the rest of the document and all the other changes that are
in there I'm happy with.
So what I can do instead is to click the drop down on Accept and Accept All Changes.
That then accepts everything else that hasn't yet been addressed.
That's the tracking of the changes.
The comments are in this other section here.
So just like you get Next and Previous Change you get Next and Previous Comments button.
So as you go through through here, there's only two comments in the whole thing, but
it will scan between them.
You as the designer can look at these comments and take action if appropriate.
Once you're done delete it.
So I've now gone through, I've deleted all the comments that were in the document and
we're now back to a clean document.
This is the like the final version.
Once you've been through and accepted or rejected all the changes, you should switch the Track
Changes feature off, so going back to the button here we then click the man button,
or if you went to the drop-down section, you'd choose the Track Changes here, which is just
an on off switch.
It's a toggle.
We're now back in safe mode, which means if we make changes in the document, the tracking
is not going to take effect.
Some final options for you.
If you go to this launcher and choose the Advanced options here.
What we see here is all the settings regarding how the markup is going to look.
So if we consider this top session OK, the insertions, any new content we added is going
to underline it in this colour.
Now where it says 'By Author', that means that the first author was red, the next one
was blue, and every subsequent author has a different colour.
You can actually go through and by colour, identify the author.
Deletions are marked with a strike through.
All of these can be changed of course, so you might want to bold it or italic it or
double underline it.
Something like that.
And again, you can set the colour for it.
Where it says Change Lines, this is referring to that marking in that left-hand margin,
the vertical marker that indicates there's been some change on that line.
And just to finish off this video today is one final thing you can do to kind of lock
down your document against further changes.
Go to the File tab, go to the Info section if you're not there already, and go to where
it says Protect Document.
And the very first option says, 'Mark As Final' and as the description says it let's readers
know that the document is final and it makes it Read Only and that prevents further changes
from happening.
So if you then want to distribute it but you don't want other changes to happen in the
meantime, this is the option to choose.
So I hope this video has answered some questions for you around tracking and comments.
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