Care to guess what freelance technology innovation I could not live without?
It’s not Microsoft Outlook, Twitter, Facebook or Evernote or though I use all of them every day.
It’s the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word.
OK, you didn’t have to work very hard to guess because the answer is in the title of this post.
Little old Track Changes. Do you know how hard it would be to do this job without it? It’s the handiest way I know of editing copy when more than one person is working on a document. It’s the shorthand of choice between editors and writers to communicate what’s good and what’s bad in a piece, to ask questions and to make comments.
Yet, not a month goes by where I encounter someone who hasn’t been introduced to it, refuses to learn, or hates it.
A freelancer once complained about a book editor she worked with who printed out pages of her manuscript to edit, scan and send back to her. Talk about living in the past.
Most full-time professional writers I know are on intimate terms with Track Changes and have been for a long time. The same goes for editors – well, most of them.
I do a lot of volunteer writing and editing projects for my kids’ schools and other nonprofit groups and when I do, I routinely work with people who’ve never heard of Track Changes. Or they know about it but haven’t ever taken the time to figure out to how make it work.
If you still aren’t using it, here’s a quick tutorial from the Microsoft Word website:
- Open the document you want to revise.
- On the Tools menu, click Track Changes.When the Track Changes feature is enabled, TRK appears on the status bar at the bottom of your document. When you turn off change tracking, TRK is dimmed.
- Make the changes you want by inserting, deleting, or moving text or graphics. You can also change formatting.
If more than one person is editing a document, each person’s suggested edits will appear in a different color, making it easy to track which person is proposing specific changes. That’s a handy feature if your editor’s editor likes to go over your copy and make suggestions for changes – don’t you love it when that happens?
We’re in the 21st century. Microsoft Word’s been out in one or another form for more than 20 years. There’s no excuse for not using it. If someone’s still making writers look at edits in hard copy it isn’t a style thing, or a fear thing, it’s an ego thing.
Great post, Michelle. I use track changes all the time–particularly when I’m working with attorney contributors to Workforce Management, who do really need to see what I’m changing in their articles.
Track changes can be a bit of a shock to writers, though, if the editor is doing heavy, heavy revision with lots of questions and changes. The article ends up looking like a Freddy Krueger victim–red from head to toe. And it can be hard to read “through” lots of tracked changes, too. In those instances, I’ll send the writer a “clean” copy along with the redline version. Another virtue of track changes for writers is that you can see what an editor is up to. You can decide for yourself if she has really made your piece better–or just reworded it to suit her own preferences.
Carroll: Thanks – it’s great to hear an editor’s perspective on this. For all of you who don’t her, Carroll is the executive editor at Crain Communication’s Workforce Management, an HR industry business magazine where I’m a regular contributor. She’s also one heck of a writer.
Michelle
I love track changes, thanks for singing its praises! I work at a company with offices in cities all over the U.S., and they’ve been snail mailing physical proofs back and forth for our annual publication. This year I’m going to implement–and insist on!–a Track Changes policy.
I’ve also used used a free Blogger blog for similar tracking. We have some copy that will be edited by people in 6 cities, so I post it to a blog (which they have to log into to see, it’s not public) and then each person can leave their comments and see the comments left by others.
That way, when it comes back and their changes haven’t been made or other changes appeared, they know where it comes from without me having to email each person.
It’s really helpful for people who aren’t used to editing and want to impart their own style on the writing. On a blog they can see that others didn’t like the things they liked, or suggested other words, etc.
I can’t imagine that many people working on one document – talk about your organizational challenges. I’d never thought to use blogging software for that, but it sounds like a good idea.
I’ve also used Google Docs and Box.net to share files with work groups. Box.net is especially nice if you need to send an editor a bunch of high res digital images that would otherwise choke a home-based Internet connection, even a high speed one. Just upload them to a Box.net folder, and send an invitation to access the folder to whoever needs it. This fall for one project I’m working on, instead of just suggesting that the group do this I went ahead and did it and then explained to everyone how it worked – so far nobody’s resisted.
Michelle
I used Word’s track changes feature about 7-8 years ago when I was working full time in the marketing department of a glass manufacturing company. It was good then. I imagine it’s even better now.