3.4 Collaborative Editing and Reviewing in Microsoft Word

Proofing Tools

As a student, you have probably been instructed to spell-check your work before handing it in. Word offers spell-check by simply selecting Spelling and Grammar on the Review tab. This tool will automatically check your spelling and grammar according to the dictionary and other language parameters in Word (which you can adjust from the default settings if desired). A dialog box will appear, and Word will give the option to accept or reject each of its corrections. It should be noted that spell-check will not always check when a word is misused.

For example, if you have typed “four” instead of “for”, spell-check will not indicate a misspelled word. The document creator will still need to proofread the document and not rely entirely on the Spelling and Grammar check tool.

Word gives its users many options for customizing their dictionary and language preferences. For example, you may frequently use the abbreviation “e.g.,” in your business documents, which means “exempli gratia,” or “for example.” If you don’t add this abbreviation to your Word dictionary, it may be labeled as a spelling mistake. “Id est” is another Latin term you might see, which means “that is to say.” After you add these words to your dictionary, Word will stop flagging them as an error (Figure 3.23).

Figure 3.23 Adding regularly used new words to your dictionary will save you time when spell-checking a document. (Used with permission from Microsoft)

Another language customization feature is setting the proofing language. Word comes with dictionaries for several languages, as well as a variety of English dialects, including British, Canadian, Australian, Caribbean, Singaporean, New Zealander, and American English. After you set your preferred dialect, Word will check your spelling and grammar according to that dialect. For example, if you choose American English as your preferred dialect, the Spelling and Grammar tool will mark the word “favour” as an error and suggest the American spelling “favor.”

Comments

Comments are used for calling attention to any content in your document that you want to solicit input on or note for yourself. You can also use comments to flag spelling or usage queries, provide instructions to others reviewing your document, remind yourself to address something later like adding a graphic or fact-checking a statement, or ask questions about the content. To add a comment, select the segment of text in question, and then select New Comment from the Review tab, as shown in Figure 3.24. You can then type within the comment and click the arrow when you’re done to make sure the comment sticks.

Figure 3.24 Comments can be used to communicate collaboratively within a document, or to add notes to yourself. (Used with permission from Microsoft)

When working in a document with comments, you can reply to any comment to add additional information or start a dialogue about a specific item. Once comments are addressed and are no longer needed in the document, you can either delete or resolve them, as Figure 3.25 shows. Deleting a comment removes it completely from the document, whereas resolving a comment retains the comment in a history stored digitally with the document.

Figure 3.25 Comments can be either deleted or resolved when they are no longer needed. (Used with permission from Microsoft)

In a collaborative business document like your market trends report, you may find that another collaborator added content that was not ideal. The next collaborator or editor in the process could flag this content with a comment and send the document back to be revised. When the collaborator is done making the changes, you or they can resolve the issue.

Tracking Changes

The shared effort of writing a document across departments and functions is achieved through the Track Changes tool on the Review tab. Once turned on, this tool literally tracks the changes a user makes to a document, using a different color to highlight each user’s edits. Once the document is saved and passed along to the next collaborator, that next user can clearly see what has changed from the original document. This makes collaborating on a document asynchronously—that is, not at the same time—easy to do.

Sometimes, you might work in a document that goes back-and-forth between you and one or two colleagues, and you review each other’s changes and resolve comments at each pass. In other cases, all feedback may be collected and processed by one person. In the latter situation, after all collaborators have added their inputs to the document, a final author decides what changes are going to be kept for the final draft. This person might be a project manager or higher-level editor, depending on the workflow and organization of your company’s editing process. This type of editing cycle—sending documents to various stakeholders for revisions and/or input—is common in many industries. An editing cycle may repeat multiple times before the document is finalized. Using Track Changes and comments allows for many iterations of the editing cycle, all while maintaining clear version history and control.

The Tracking command group offers options for which changes or markups are shown. You can toggle between No Markup and All Markup to see tracked and clean versions of a document (Figure 3.26). The Show Markup selections allow you to turn off Formatting revisions so you can focus more easily on content changes. There is also an option to turn on/off feedback from specific reviewers. These possibilities are helpful when you have a document with a lot of markup and want to focus on one area of input in particular.

Figure 3.26 (a) Users can adjust how much markup they see, as well as (b) what types or markups are shown and which reviewers’ feedback is displayed. (Used with permission from Microsoft)

Collaborators, or a final author, have the option to accept or reject each change that has been tracked. While reviewing changes, you can hover over any individual edit to see who made the edit and when, as shown in Figure 3.27. The Changes command group on the Review tab has the option of accepting or rejecting the various tracked edits as they are reviewed. You can also select to accept all changes in the document without reviewing them individually.

Figure 3.27 (a) Track Changes tells you who made a revision, and at what time, and (b) lets you accept or reject each suggested edit. (Used with permission from Microsoft)

Protect

If you do not want certain collaborators to change a document, you may configure your document so that future readers of a document can change only certain components. In the Protect command group on the Review tab, select Restrict Editing. This will offer two types of restrictions that you can set, as Figure 3.28 shows. The first, Formatting restrictions, lets you specify which elements of a document can be edited (see Figure 3.29). For example, you might allow editing only to the main text and not allow it to headers or tables. The second option, Editing restrictions, limits the level of editing others can do—from none, to commenting only, to only tracked revisions. Those restrictions can be further customized to allow different restrictions for different users.

Figure 3.28 Document protections can be added by restricting editing to certain components of a document, or to limited levels of editing. (Used with permission from Microsoft)

Figure 3.29 (a) Formatting restrictions can get quite detailed; however, they’re important to set to keep your document’s style from becoming inconsistent. (b) Editing restrictions for other users can range from allowing others to work freely, to work in Track Changes, or to “read only” and not make any changes. (Used with permission from Microsoft)