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Editing for Psychoanalysis Eve Golden, M.D. |
Tracking Changes in MS WORD
Word's change-tracking feature marks visibly where and how any changes have been made in a document. Let's say that you've given your paper to an editor. She's likely to propose some changes, but you want (as you should) to check them over before they are written in stone. Or you're collaborating with a colleague, and neither of you is allowed to alter anything unilaterally. Or you want to try out several versions of a paragraph before deciding which one to keep. Change-tracking shows all changes to an original draft by displaying them—deletions, insertions, or moves (delete/insert sequences)—in different-looking type. You can choose the visual cues you want to use to mark your alterations—color, underlining, strikeout, etc. While change-tracking is on, you can specify whether you want to see the original version, the changed version, or both together. Once you've given each putative change a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, you tell Word to accept or reject it, and the favored version is built permanently into the document.
How to do it. (These directions are for Word 97. Other versions of Word differ slightly, but not significantly. You should not have any trouble translating to your version, but if you do, call me.)
Go to Tools-Track Changes, and select Highlight Changes. You will see a dialog box. Once you check "Track changes while editing," the text of the document will be preserved in both its new and its original forms. How this shows up on the screen is a function of the choices you make when you click the "Options" button in the dialog box, but if you don't want to bother making decisions you can stick with the default. If you want to read your file without the distraction of seeing the cross-outs and inserts, you can uncheck the "Highlight changes on screen" box, and then check it again when you want both versions available for comparison. (You can specify whether you want the changes suppressed or not in a printed document by checking or unchecking the "Highlight changes in printed document" box.)
When you're ready to make a decision about one proposed change or many, go to Tools-Track Changes, and select Accept or Reject Changes. You will see another dialog box that helps you proceed through the document, accepting or rejecting the changed areas of text that you select. Word puts a vertical line in the left margin of every line of text where a change has occurred to make sure you don't miss any.
Once the text is the way you want it, turn off change-tracking—Tools-Track Changes-Highlight Changes—and uncheck "Track changes while editing." If you don't, you'll continue to compile changes unnecessarily, and then have to go back and do the accept/reject business again.
This process is cumbersome to describe in absentia but very easy to understand with a document in front of you to play with. If you come to rely on change tracking, you can make life much easier for yourself by establishing macros for accepting and rejecting changes—they spare you a lot of mousing around between the text and the menus. I will post the macros that I use on a future page. But even in its most rudimentary form change- tracking is worth the few minutes it takes to get used to it. At the very least it makes collaborative work with an editor very much easier, and it has far broader potential than that.
A word of caution. Like everything else in this imperfect world, and especially like everything Microsoft, the change-tracking implementation in Word is flawed. It has two occasional bugs that I am aware of; if anyone knows of any others I'd like to hear about them. The first is that very rarely when change-tracking is on, Word will hang up when you try to use the cut command. The way to handle this is to save your work frequently (I don't really have to say that, do I?). Then if a hangup happens, which it usually doesn't, you won't be much the worse for it. Change-tracking is too valuable a tool to avoid it for this reason. I handle this bug by adding a save to my cut command, so that every time I cut within a document, the document gets saved first; that way I can use change-tracking fearlessly. I'll post the directions for that too, some day. (Until then, you know, if I could figure it out, you can. . .)
Bug number two is that occasionally Word's concrete little mind gets confused about what the original document was. It is supposed to be able to keep several authors separate by assigning them different colors, but every once in a while it gets tangled up and starts thinking that the red text is original. This is a pain but rare and harmless, and not worth worrying about. I mention it so you won't think you're crazy if it happens.
I've appended a series of screen shots illustrating the change-tracking process on a separate page. Please be aware, though, that these are very large files and will take a while to load. I tried making them smaller, but they were too hard to read :(
