From the course: The Best of Word Tips Weekly

Customize Track Changes

From the course: The Best of Word Tips Weekly

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Customize Track Changes

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- [Instructor] If you've ever collaborated on a document with others here in Microsoft Word, you're likely familiar with the track changes feature. It tracks the changes people make to a document, whether they're adding something or removing, or even changing something that's there. But there are some options you may not be familiar with that we're going to explore in this weeks' Word tip. We'll do it with this file, if you have the exercise files. Open up Best of Landon Hotel Hotel Guide 056. If you don't have 'em, not to worry, you can follow along with any document. First of all, track changes needs to be turned on if we want to track the changes we make. And we do that from the review tab here in the ribbon. You'll see track changes here in the tracking group. And the top half, Control + Shift + E is the keyboard shortcut, will turn on track changes. If you want to share this document and make sure people can't turn it off, you can click the arrow at the bottom and choose Lock Tracking. That way, when they receive it, it will be on. They can't turn it off unless they know the password that you assign. But we're just going to go with track changes. Now since we turn this on, anything we do to the document will be tracked. And will be color coded as well. We're going to talk about setting up the colors to be more consistent and turning off things that don't necessarily always need to be tracked. For example, if I wanted to go to Landon Hotel, and select those two words, and maybe underline them. I can do that from the home tab, for example, or use the keyboard shortcut Control + U. I'm just going to click the underline button. You can see what happens. It now shows up underline, but it's also being tracked. A few seconds ago, David Rivers formatted this with underlining. We can click in the background here to deselect the text. And this is the kind of that can get confusing and clutter up your document. If you're not concerned with formatting things like underlining, italics, bolding, and so on, you're more concerned about the content. What's being added, removed, or edited. In that case, you might want to turn off the formatting option and stop tracking that and focus in on the content. The other thing you'll want to do is probably keep your color consistent. For example, if I change it from the best of Landon Hotel and just change it to the best dash Landon Hotel, I would select the content, the word of, delete it, you can hit your delete key. Notice what happens, I'm in red here. You might be seeing a different color. But it's showing up on the page with a line through it in red, and now I can add my dash, and because I've added it and the space after it, you can see, that also shows up in red. So that happens to be my color. And that's kind of an urgent type of color. I might want to change it to something else. And you'll also notice sometimes different colors showing up for different types of changes you make. Where do we make these adjustments? We do it from the review tab, go back to that. Go back to the tracking section, but this time we'll click the little arrow on the bottom right corner, where we can access our track changes options. One of the things that we can turn off, there it is, formatting. When we turn that off, it's not going to keep track of the things that we change in the way of formatting, and allow us to focus in on the content. We can also go to advanced options here, give that button a click, where you'll see, for example, moving things, inserting cells and tables, you can see different colors being used for different types of things we change. And if you want to stay consistent, you can change these colors to all be the same. Now, comments, you can see by author, we can click the dropdown and change it to something like a bright green. I'm going to go with bright green, and I'm going to do it for everything here. Bright green, bright green, I'm going to change the colors here for moving from and to, to that green. It's called bright green. As opposed to that dark green. There are some colors that you'd probably want to avoid, the lighter colors are sometimes difficult to see. So, that's why I'm going with these bright options. The light yellow and light orange, could be difficult, and again, I'm going to choose something different here. You can see the only options are fairly light and in fact, if I wanted to, I could go to by author, and use that default. Let's go ahead and do that. Same thing here for formatting. Now we can track formatting and turn it off from here as well. And you can see, there's a number of different options down below that will not be tracked now. And when we click OK, and click OK again, to save those changes. All of a sudden, the color's different on our page, and we lose that panel down the right hand side because we're no longer tracking the formatting. The formatting change, which was to add underlining to these two words, is no longer tracked. So really helps us to focus on the content. If you do use track changes, and you're going to be collaborating with others on a document, it's a great way to keep track of who's doing what. But on many occasions, the formatting is not so important, the content more important. And to stay consistent with your own set of colors, can make it easier to see who's doing what in your document.

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