Tools of the Trade: Document Track Changes

Last week, I shared with you some tips for taking a document review ‘old school’ – using pen and paper to capture comments and changes, rather than jumping straight into a digital copy. Key to taking your review to the next level and ensuring that you can clearly communicate your feedback to others is being able to translate that into electronic form – enter my #1 ‘Tool of the Trade’ for contract negotiation: Track Changes.

I’m a Mac convert, so my notations below are specific to Word for Mac, but all of these features work in the classic Windows Suite as well.

Here are 4 tips for getting the most out of your Track Changes:

1)   Know your security settings

It’s rather embarrassing how long it took me to find out about the security settings in Word. But thanks to a very helpful colleague I now know how to ensure that my commentary and language changes (and those of my counterparts!) don’t end up flagged as ‘anonymous’.

Head to your Word Options/Preferences tab, Security options, and you’ll see a wee box that indicates “Remove personal data upon saving”. Make sure this is UN-checked.

Leaving it selected is a great way to preserve anonymity, but when you’re exchanging documents with colleagues or counterparts, you’re going to need to see which participant made which changes.

De-select, and your user name will be tagged to all changes that you’ve made. Which leads us to…

2)   Personalize it

That User45642 made a change tells your fellow negotiators and document reviewers approximately nothing about the origin of the commentary. Same goes for nicknames (ContractGirl34) or simple initials (ds). A first initial and full last name tends to work well, and you may even want to add your company name for further clarity.

Adjusting this is easy in the Word Options/Preferences tab.

3)   View changes selectively

A document free of mark-ups is a beautiful thing. It hold so much potential. So much hope for the deal that lies ahead. And then, 2 weeks into the negotiation, it’s a tangle of inserts, deletions, comment bubbles and about as many colour codes as you can imagine. Too. Much. Information.

Your Track Changes toolbar will give you options on what specific changes you’d like to view. Don’t care about formatting? Deselect. Just your counterparts’ feedback? Deselect all other users.

Doing this doesn’t get rid of the other changes, it just hides them until you’re ready for your review.

Hint: I like showing only the formatting changes every once in a while, and then selecting “Approve all changes showing” – it accepts them all in one shot, helping to keep the document free of clutter.

4)   Share the news

You may want to keep the entire document intact when collecting feedback. But sometimes, you need to send a single paragraph to someone – they really don’t need to receive the other 67 pages of confused mark-ups. Copy-pasting from a document with Track Changes is tricky – when you move the text, your new document will accept all of the changes and show only the resulting language…which defeats the purpose of sending it in the first place.

To make sure nothing is lost in the process:

i)             De-activate Track Changes in your original document
ii)            Select and copy the required text
iii)           Paste into a new document, with Track Changes de-activated
iv)           Make sure that the Security settings aren’t going to erase the source information!
v)            Save – and send off for review.

It can take a while to get the hang of using Track Changes on your documents – but it’s worth it. Not having to decipher commentary, or deal with manually inserted and formatted text will speed up the process incredibly, and give you more confidence in your reviews – and acceptance – of language.

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Do you use Track Changes? What’s your favourite feature? Any tips or tricks to share? Funniest User Name you’ve come across?