Working with a tracked changes file

This is the third article of four in a short series on working with tracked changes. You can also read about why I don’t believe every change should be tracked, and which buttons to press when you have changes tracked in your file. I end this series with a look at handling comments in Word. If you’re a complete novice, or a bit out of practice with tracked changes files, perhaps read up on which buttons do what, first.

But now, let’s think about how you’re going to approach the job when your file comes back full of tracked changes and you need to decide what to accept and what to reject. So here’s what I recommend.

Scenario 1: the file is edited, or has been reviewed by colleagues, but it’s going to undergo more rounds of revision

Either ask your editor to return a clean copy of the file along with the tracked changes one, or make a clean copy yourself (save the file with a new name, then accept all the changes in one go).

Work on the clean file. Read it afresh, as edited, and see if it’s now fit for purpose. Don’t worry about the changes that your editor or colleagues tracked. They’re history! If they had any questions or comments, they will still appear, in bubbles on the (usually) right-hand side of the page.

Continue as you ordinarily would, making further changes or being content with what’s now there.

For easier reading, if you can, delete comments that have served their purpose. A long and/or outdated conversation in comments is pointless. Delete! (This is the topic for the next article in this mini-series.)

If you really want to know what the editor (or other reviewer) has done at a particular point, by all means open up the copy of the file that has the tracked changes still showing, but for your own sake, limit your exposure to a tracked file with everything showing. I still find it hard to interpret and I work with such files all the time!

Scenario 2: you’ve been asked to review the editor’s work and then the book or article is going on to publication

VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE! This is not the time to make further little (or large) changes to the file. It’s not an opportunity to rewrite chunks. The publisher should have made this clear to you already.

You should restrict yourself to accepting or rejecting changes, and answering author queries.

If you see a real clanger of a mistake, either leave a comment for the editor to sort it out, perhaps with the required wording, or the corrected date or reference, or what have you. Depending on what you’ve been told is required, you may get away with making the change yourself but with tracked changes turned on (the second piece in this series shows you how). Alternatively, if there are only a very few, hold small changes that won’t affect pagination until the proofs stage, but it’s always better to make essential changes before typesetting.

There is nothing quite like the sinking feeling an editor gets when an author returns the file and airily says that they’ve made a few other little fixes but hasn’t tracked them.

This means the editor is going to have to run the Compare function and then wade through all the differences in the files (which, of course, include the edits accepted and rejected, so it’s needle in a haystack time and an enormous time suck) and then see if your new wording needs any editing (perhaps the text is being published with ‑ise spellings, and you naturally use ‑ize ones, or you prefer to use the % symbol, whereas the publisher insists on ‘per cent’).

Such inconsistencies introduced into the file just when the editing is substantially complete are a horror story. So just don’t do it – use one of the two ways I’ve suggested to convey essential last-minute changes without changing the text of the file – leave a comment asking the editor to do it, or track the changes!! And let your editor know there are new tracked changes to be reviewed.

Back to handling the file in scenario 2.

Follow the style!

If you’ve been given a style guide by the publisher, and/or the editor has provided a style sheet, have that at your elbow as you work. You will see from that which changes simply have to be accepted (publisher’s preferred spellings, perhaps, or punctuation style, or the capitalisation of headings and that kind of thing).

If you’ve not got either of those, ask your desk editor (or production manager or other title) for them. Otherwise you’ll be floundering in the dark.

Whizz through the file accepting these unarguable changes, and get them out of the way. Then you can concentrate on the important stuff. You also won’t waste your time, and everyone else’s, which is also important stuff!

Accepting all changes

This one’s easy. If you’ve had a look, and are content that you will accept everything, then do so. Or maybe almost everything is good, but there are a couple of places you’re going to push back. Go and deal with those first, then you can accept everything else safely, with a couple of clicks.

Go to the Review tab, find the Tracking and Changes blocks of buttons, and click on Accept All Changes. Only choose Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking if you’re absolutely positive that no new keystrokes are going to be made. On a PC using Word365, it looks like this:

Sifting changes

Follow the instructions in Navigating Tracked Changes in Word: a quick guide to find out how to filter changes by type or person.

You might find you want to accept all the formatting changes to clear the decks (or so you can see the wood for the trees, if you prefer land-based metaphors). If so, do that, following the instructions given in the previous article, and then you can look at each remaining more substantive change and accept or reject each one in turn.

Accepting individual changes

If you look at the figure again, you’ll see the top two options are Accept and Move to Next, and Accept This Change (which won’t move the cursor on).

For each change you’re happy to keep, click on the appropriate option. The top option, which also moves you to the position of the next change, is probably the handiest.

Bear in mind that some changes are multi-part, for want of a better description. Changing a comma to a full stop and starting a new sentence needs several steps:

1    Deleting the comma

2    Typing the full stop

3    Deleting the lowercase letter at the start of the new sentence

4    Typing the uppercase letter in its place.

You may find it less irritating to select a few characters either side of where a change occurs, and then click the Accept button. In this way, those four changes will be accepted as easily as just one.

Rejecting

What if the editor’s suggestion is just wrong? Or you’re both wrong and something else is needed?

Rejecting is very similar to accepting, although the results are rather different! The buttons to click are almost the same – just use the Reject button to access the options instead.

If you need to replace the suggested change with something else, then add a comment at this point (we get to comments in the next article) with what should appear in that place.

When and how to view the tracked changes

There are times when you do need to look at the changes in their tracked form. If you’re working on a clean file, then open the tracked changes one. If you’re working on the tracked one, select All Markup and brace yourself!

All those colours and crossings-out reflect what’s happened (deletion, insertion, moved text) and who did it (each reviewer/editor will have their own colours, by default). It can be really hard to see what’s what! The comments bubbles at the side of the page will show exactly who did what and there may be an overwhelming amount!

Accepting and rejecting changes will leave the new text unchanged, or change it back, and delete the related comment bubble. If you’re working with tracked changes switched on, for yourself, and making further changes, then your own comment bubble will appear in place of the original one. If you’re in the All Markup view on the file you’re changing, you’ll see these appear, along with your keystrokes. If you’re in the Simple or No Markup view of the file, then you won’t see the comments bubbles appear, but you will see a red line vertically in the left-hand margin against the lines you’ve changed.

However, suppose the clean version of the text just looks wonky at a given place. Seeing what the reviewer(s) or editor did in the edits may clarify what’s going on, and enable you to fix the working copy of the file effectively, because now you understand what was there originally, and what the reviewer(s) or editor did.

Here’s a handy little trick if you’re using the tracked changes version of the file, but had been working in Simple Markup.

Go to the View tab and find the Window block. Click on New Window, which looks like this on a PC using Word365:

Word will open in a new window the very same file, not a separate copy. It will call the file you were in [filename]-1 and the new view of that file [filename]-2. And, magically, you can have the Simple Markup view in one and the All Markup view in the other. If you accept or reject a change in one view, it shows in the other, because it’s the self-same file.

So instead of having to flick backwards and forwards between Simple and All Markup, or flicking between files and trying to remember which one it is you’re updating, this method is sweetness and light.

To see both copies of the file at the same time, in that Windows block, click on View Side by Side. Hey presto! And if it helps, use the scroll bars to align the two views so that the text is in the same place on each one, and then click on Synchronised Scrolling, and the files will scroll up and down at the same rate.

If there are a lot of changes, you’ll find that you will get out of sync at some stage – how quickly depends on the number and sheer size of the changes. However, if that happens, just click Synchronised Scrolling again to turn it off, reposition one of the views to match where you want to be, and click it on again.

If you’ve been working with a clean file and there’s a separate tracked changes one, have both files open, then go to that same Windows block on the View tab and click on View Side by Side. Everything works the same, but as you have two separate files, changes made on one won’t appear in the other, so do pay attention to which file you’re updating.

Roundup

My best advice is to spend as little time as possible with the file showing All Changes and trying to decide what to accept and what not to accept. It is painful and stressful, and will too easily give an unexpected and unwelcome outcome!

If you’re obliged to accept or reject every change, see what changes you can accept as a group – formatting changes are the most obvious ones. Then you have a clearer idea of what changes are important and can make your individual decisions on those without tiresome distractions.