See below for real title

Due to technical formatting limitations and my lame desire to try and be clever the real title of this post is:

Be the Change Tracking You Want to See in the World

Anyway…

Change Tracking, a.k.a. Track Changes, a.k.a. redlining, a.k.a. the button I press when I want to keep track of who is doing what. Most of us have used it. Many of us love it. Some of us don't like it. But I don't think any of us know about all of the nifty things it can do and/or why you'd want to do these nifty things.

Enter the next few posts from yours truly. Specifically, here's what I'd like to cover in the next few posts:

• The what and why of basic change tracking

• The what and why of the various change tracking views/filters

• The what and why of customization of what is tracked and how it is tracked

We'll cover the first in this post, and the later two in future posts.

The what and why of basic change tracking

Change tracking is the Word feature that tracks all changes made to a document. Specifically, all changes made to a document while you track changes are:

• Marked-up à By default, new content (insertions) are underlined, content that is removed (deletions) are struck though, content that is cut and pasted or dragged within the document (moves) are double-underlined, and content whose look is changed (formatted) is flagged with a balloon. By default, insertions and deletions are also colored red and moves are colored green (this can be changed but we'll cover that in a later post). Finally, a change indicator is shown next to lines that contain changes

  

• Attributed to the user who made them à While you track changes, all insertions, deletions, and moves are tagged with the user name you specify the first time you run Word or set in the Word options dialog.

  

• Can be navigated à The handy Previous and Next commands on the Changes chunk of the Review tab allow you to jump from one change to the next like this:

• Can be accepted or rejected à Usually you don't want your document to stay marked up with change tracking. What you want is to see each change, think about whether you want to "accept" it or "reject" it, and actually accept it or reject it.

  As you may have guessed, actually accepting or rejecting tracked changes is done by using the Accept and Reject buttons on the Changes chunk of the Review tab. Accept and Reject work like this:

  	Accept (I like this…)	Reject (I do not like this…)
  Insertion (addition of new content)	Intent: I want this new content to be part of the document. Action: I accept the insertion. Result: Mark-up cleared, author removed, and content integrated into the document	Intent: I do not want this new content to be part of the document. Action: I reject the insertion. Result: Content removed from the document
  Deletion (removal of pre-existing content)	Intent: I do not want this pre-existing content to be part of the document anymore. Action: I accept the deletion. Result: Content removed from the document.	Intent: I want this pre-existing content to be part of the document. Action: I reject the deletion. Result: Mark-up cleared, author removed, and content reintegrated into the document
  Move (relocation of pre-existing content)	Intent: I want this pre-existing content to be moved to the proposed location. Action: I accept the move. Result: Mark-up cleared, author removed, and content integrated into the document at the new location	Intent: I want this pre-existing content to remain in its original location. Action: I reject the move. Result: Mark-up cleared, author removed, and content reintegrated into the document at its original location

It's important to note that the only ways to get rid of Tracked Changes are to Accept or Reject them, to delete them like anything else (i.e. select the change and press delete), or to run the Comments, Revisions, Versions, and Annotations Document Inspector—which Accepts all the changes). That's it. Turning off change tracking or changing views does not get rid of tracked changes. The former stops new changes from being tracked and the latter simply hides them.

That's the basics of change tracking. More to come…

-Jonathan