For those of us that review and edit documents on a daily basis, using the Track Changes feature of Microsoft Word has become second nature. If you’re not familiar with it, this feature keeps a history of all of your comments, changes to the document, etc. and allows you to ultimately accept or reject each change to your document. It’s an extremely useful tool, especially when you have a document that is going through multiple people before it’s finished.

Because of the popularity of this tool in many offices, I’ve decided to share three tips that should make your life easier when using the Track Changes functionality:

Don’t leave changes hanging - If you can approve or reject a change, make sure that you actually do it. The more and more changes that you have the larger your document size is going to be. Consequently, it’s going to load slower and be harder to work with. Plus, you have a ton of editing marks lying around. If you can instantly make a decision on a change, don’t hesitate because the document isn’t “done” yet. For instance, when you update a table of contents, this gets marked as a change. Instead of leaving it, go right ahead and accept or reject it. Another example is if you correct a spelling or grammar error. Deal with it on the spot instead of letting that change linger.

Leave comments in appropriate places - When you leave a comment for someone, make sure that it is attached to a relevant section of the document. Many times I’ll get a comment that covers multiple sections, or is simply put at the end. If you are going to make a comment with Track Changes on, make it an inline comment (next to what you’re talking about). This makes them much easier to understand as you don’t have to flip back and forth through different pages to see what a comment is referencing.

Take off Markup View when done - This happens to probably 50% of the documents that get sent to me: The author forgets to take the document off of Markup View when they are done. Not a good thing, this allows the end user to see all comments, etc. that were made to the document. To solve this, simply do the following right before you send out your completed document: Accept all changes and Switch to Normal View. The last thing you want is a client seeing a comment like “What the hell is this? You have to stop drinking when you’re writing these.”.

These are just three quick tips, do you have any tips or tricks you use? Let us know in the Comments section below.