Tricks from Word Expert Hilary Powers

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If Hilary Powers can teach editors tricks about using Word, then we ordinary folk can definitely benefit from listening to her. Hilary's the author of Making Word Work for You, a handbook for editors, and the maker of creatures out of felt.

As an editor, I collaborate with a lot of people and so continually use Track Changes. If you know how to use it, your back and forth with co-workers, or in my line of work, with authors, speeds up getting a document from first draft to final draft.  Here are my tips:

The settings you choose for Track Changes apply only to your version of Word - so don't bother making rules about what people should do. You can recommend choices about colors and balloons, but what one reviewer does with those settings has no effect on anyone else.  

Setting the color to "by reviewer" is the only way for you to get different colors for different reviewers on your computer. However, that delivers you to the Surprise Party Department: the author of the first change Word encounters in a session almost certainly gets red, the second is probably blue, and the third more often than not green. Then six other colors - some quite readable, others noxious - appear for the next six reviewers, after which #10 starts over with red. If you don't like the color assigned to someone with a big presence in the document, close Word and reopen it, opening a different file first; that will give you a new lucky dip.

Replace logical units - a whole word instead of a letter or two; a whole sentence instead of every other word - to make it easier for others to see the effect of a change. The easiest way to get a replacement for a whole word is to select the offending letters and type over them; the tracking will show the whole word deleted and retyped.

Don't track changes in formatting unless you absolutely need the knowledge; it cruds up the revision marks and turns rejecting a change into a nightmare. The setting actually works in Word 2010, but unlike other options it's document-specific. I keep an icon on the Quick Access Toolbar to run a recorded macro that turns off format tracking.

Protection for tracked changes works as advertised in Word 2010, really letting you define whether or not reviewers can change the document by inserting comments and adding or deleting text (which will be tracked). In Word 2003, you could write macros to approve or reject changes even though protection was in place.

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