How to View Track Changes in MS Word

• Nov 27, 2020
• 5 min read

In the analog days, editors frequently used a red pen to mark their edits in a manuscript. The reason a different color was chosen was to mark their changes against the original. In the digital age, MS Word’s “Track Changes” feature performs a similar function. This is also the most common way for PaperTrue’s editors to mark our edits in your document. Using its various features, we mark minor changes in grammar and punctuation to larger ones like restructuring or reordering your text. 

Following our edits, we send you a copy of a clean edited manuscript as well as the one with tracked changes, which will help you understand where and how we’ve made changes. Having these markings with you will also help you understand the rationale behind an edit. 

But if one doesn’t know how to access and navigate their edited documents, it may get confusing, or even worse, you may miss the edits altogether! Surely, you don’t want that? 

How to view tracked changes 

Once you receive your edited document, open it and go to the ‘Review’ tab, which you will find on the top. 

Go to ‘Tracking’ and select ‘Track Changes’. When this is on, you will see that your editor’s changes are in red. Deletions are struck out and additions are marked in red. If an editor decides to add comments that elaborate on their rationale behind a change, they appear on the side as well.

Viewing changes by type of edit 

If your document has numerous and minute changes, it can get difficult to make sense of all the changes at once. In order to save the anxiety of being lost under a barrage of corrections, you can use the ‘Show Markup’ option to filter the type of edit you want to see. 

As seen in the image above, you can choose to see ‘Comments’, ‘Insertions and Deletions’ and ‘Formatting’ related changes individually, and get through each type of edit one by one.

Reviewing track changes 

On the left-hand side of your document, you will see a ‘Reviewing Pane’, where you can see a summary of the changes suggested for your document. It will look something like this:

As you can see, this tells you the number of total changes, as well as the number of each type of change.

Once you get a fair idea of the amount of work you need to do, you can go about implementing the suggestions made by your editor.

Accepting and rejecting changes 

Under the Review tab, go to ‘Changes’. You will find something like this:

Once you’re there, you can either ‘Accept’ or ‘Reject’ a suggestion. Once you’ve chosen an action, the document will move on to the next change.

Keep doing this until you are done with reviewing all the changes.

We hope this helps you when you’re reviewing your document edited by PaperTrue.

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Chetna

Chetna is a child of the internet. A writer and aspiring educator, she loves exploring digital media to create resources that are informative and engaging. Away from the writing desk, she enjoys cinema, coffee, and old books.