Microsoft Word 2003 - Revising Word Documents
Tracking Changes
When the Track Changes feature is turned on Word automatically records the deletions, insertions, and comments made by each reviewer. Although these changes are recorder, they do not change the ordinal document until accepted in the final review.
Note: An indication that Track Changes is active are the letter TRK displayed on the Word Status Toolbar.


For example, you can elect to identify:
- Insertions by Color only, Bold, Italics, Underline, Double Underline, Strikethrough, By Author, or None (appears as regular text).
- Deletions - all of the above including Hidden (hides the deletion), or by using placeholders (^ and #).
- Changed lines - the option to use or not use a vertical line to indicate a text or formatting change in either the left or right-hand page margin.
- Comments - another user preference Color by Author or a selected color.
- Balloons in (Print and Web Layout) - the option of using balloons, Never or Always, or to display only comment and formatting changes.
Preferred Width - the width of the balloons (option to use inches or percent)
Margin - display balloons in either the right or left margin
Show lines connecting to text - by removing the checkmark, the dashed connecting line is partially hidden until the balloon is selected. The same applies to comment balloons.
Printing with Balloons (Paper Orientation with choice of three print settings)
- Auto - based on your margin and balloon settings Word chooses the best print layout.
- Preserve - prints the document using the Page Setup settings.
- Forced Landscape - prints the document and balloons in the landscape layout.
Reviewing Changes One at a Time
Before beginning, remember that you can choose to review input by a specific reviewer or by all reviewers. The power to choose or combine choices such as addressing format changes, comments, inserted or deleted text are yours to decide.
For example to review only comments, change the view to Final Showing Markup and then click on the Show button and remove the checkmarks for Ink Annotations, Insertions and Deletions, and Formatting.
Another option under your control is whose comments do you want to review? If you prefer to review only the comments made by a specific reviewer, remove the checkmark from the front of the other reviewer's names.
Navigating through the Changes
Use the Previous and Next buttons located on the Reviewing Toolbar to navigate through the modifications that you selected to display. You can either Accept or Reject a change (in this example a comment) by using the Accept Change or Reject Change/Delete Comment buttons on the toolbar. Another method is to right-click on the Balloon Comment and select from the context sensitive menu.
Accepting or Rejecting All Tracked Changes
In the prior example, we elected to display only the comments from one or more reviewers. This time select the changes that you want displayed and choose from one or more reviewers.
Follow the next steps:
- Change the Display for Review to Review.
- Make any additional edits in this view.
- Proof read the document again.
- Click on the button Accept All Changes Shown or the button Reject All Changes in Document.

- To print a document containing revisions first change the document to Print Layout.
- Change the Display for Review to either Final Showing Markup or Ordinal Showing Markup.
- Click on the Show button, select what revisions and by whom are to display.
- Click on the menu File | Print. When the Print dialog box opens click on the drop-down arrow for the label Print What.
- Select Document showing markup if you want to print the document with the markup.
- Select List of markup to print only the markup and not the document.