How to Track Changes and Insert Comments

“Old” Word (2003)

When you are reviewing a peer’s paper, here are instructions for how to electronically edit their papers:

Use your mouse to highlight a part of the text where you wish to make a comment. Click on Insert…Comment.Type in the box that shows up on the right side of your screen, then click back to the main part of the text when you are done. If the comments instead show up as lines on the bottom of your screen, go to View… then choose Page Layout or Print Layout (Mac or Windows, respectively). That should fix the comments so they appear next to your words.[a1]

You may also want to fix typos, change a few words, break up a run on sentence, or make other corrections or changes to their document. To do this, you want to turn ON the Track Changes feature. On a Windows machine, click on Tools… Track Changes (or just hit Ctrl-E). This will turn on changes. On a MAC, you also click on Tools… Track Changes… Highlight Changes… Then, a window will pop up. Be sure the first two choices are selected then click OK.

Either way, once you turn on Track Changes or Insert a Comment, an extra menu should appear at the top of your screen, underneath (or to the right of) your regular menu. While this picture is from a MAC, the Windows menu should have the same choices:

You can use buttons on this new menu to do the same things. For instance, you can insert a New Comment, you can turn Track Changes on and off, and you can delete comments from this menu.

This menu will be more important to you after you receive feedback from your buddies. If you want to use one of the “marked up” copies of your document, you can click on the little arrow by the check mark (below) and then Accept All Changes to accept everything that person did. Or, you can have your cursor on one of the changes, and then just Accept Change, and do it one at a time. The X button can delete a comment or reject a change.

If you are confused about any of this or need some more instruction, please email Wendy. If you have the technology available, you can write on the person’s draft, and then scan it and email it back to that person. Or, you can just type your comments in with their text, making your text different some how (italics, all caps, different font, or different color, etc).

“New” Word (2007 or 2008)

If you have the truly new Word (2010), you’re on your own. Hopefully these other directions are close enough to figure it out 

Use your mouse to highlight a part of the text where you wish to make a comment. Click on Review…New Comment.Type in the box that shows up on the right side of your screen, then click back to the main part of the text when you are done. If the comments instead show up as lines on the bottom of your screen, while you are still on the Review menu, click the small arrow by Reviewing Pane, then chose vertical instead of horizontal. That should fix the comments so they appear next to your words.[a2]

The Review menu will be more important to you after you receive feedback from your buddies. If you want to use one of the “marked up” copies of your document, you can click on the little arrow by Accept and then Accept All Changes to accept everything that person did. Or, you can have your cursor on one of the changes, and then just Accept (click on the button rather than on the small arrow), and do it one at a time. The Reject button can reject a change. Next to New Comment, there is a Delete button to delete a comment.

[a1]Here is what a comment looks like on the screen.

[a2]Here is what a comment looks like on the screen.