Use Caution with Track Changes in Office 2003
The “Track Changes” feature in Office 2003 is a valuable tool for team collaboration on a particular document. It facilitates online review by allowing authors, editors, or reviewers of a document to easily make and view tracked changes and comments in a document. At the same time, it is a feature that requires a bit of caution when you are using it in order to save you and your firm from a potentially embarrassing situation.
The revisions and comments are visible in the document unless they are hidden (which means they are still part of the document) or they have been removed. Typically, Word displays changes and comments with strikethrough text for deletions and underlined text for insertions. These changes can also be displayed using callout balloons in the margin of the document.
Examples
The “Track Changes” feature has come up in Boomer Technology Circle™ meetings and in our own personal experience at Boomer Consulting, Inc. One firm shared a story where they were receiving a proposal from another company and when they opened the word document, all the revisions and comments were visible. In this example, the discovery increased the firm’s bargaining power because one of the comments read, “If they balk at this number we can always go down to X dollars.”
In our personal run-in with this issue, we received a proposal document from a potential business partner and when we opened the document, once again, all the comments and revisions were visible. While there were no “foot in mouth” comments in this particular document, it did not put forward the clean and professional impression you want to present to prospective clients.
How Can I Avoid This Situation?
To avoid an embarrassing situation similar to the above example, you should follow some simple steps before sending out documents to external parties.
- On the View menu, point to Toolbars, and then click Reviewing.
- On the Reviewing toolbar, click Show, and then make sure that a check mark appears next to each of the following items:
- Comments
- Ink Annotations (Word 2003 only)
- Insertions and Deletions
- Formatting
- Reviewers (Point to Reviewers and make sure that All Reviewers is selected.)
- If a check mark does not appear next to an item, click the item to select it.
- On the Reviewing toolbar, click Next to advance from one revision or comment to the next.
- On the Reviewing toolbar, click Accept Change or Reject Change/Delete Comment for each revision or comment.
- Repeat steps 3 and 4 until all the revisions in the document have been accepted or rejected and all the comments have been deleted.
If you know that you want to accept all the changes, click the arrow next to Accept Change, and then click Accept All Changes in Document. If you know that you want to reject all the changes, click the arrow next to Reject Change/Delete Comment, and then click Reject All Changes in Document. To remove all comments, you must delete them. Click the arrow next to Reject Change/Delete Comment, and then click Delete All Comments in Document.
There is also a tool available for download from Microsoft called the "Remove Hidden Data Tool." It functions with Office XP and Office 2003. Follow this link to read about and download it.