Finalizing Long Documents

Name: Finalizing Long Documents
Author: Eric Andal

Discover how you can make final changes to your documents before publishing in Word.

Preview the first lesson free — get full access to all 4 lessons.

Course: On-Demand

In this lesson, you will learn about tracking changes before finalizing a document. Let's take a look at how you can effectively track changes in Microsoft Word. Here I have a Word document with more than one collaborator, in this case it's myself, in the document itself here in Microsoft Word, and in another Microsoft Word online or 365 document, opened separately in a web browser, so I'm logged in at two places for the sake of this example. Now here we are on the review ribbon. This is where you will need to be in order to enable track changes, which we see here, under tracking tools, we have here track changes. By default, change tracking is not enabled, so we will need to enable it. So we'll go ahead and do that. I'll go ahead and click on track changes, and now from this point on, any changes made to this document will be tracked. Now I'm going to go ahead and insert some text so we can begin to track changes. I'll go ahead and start to do that first in the separate web browser that I have opened, so it'll be in this example, like another user entering text first. So there we see text entered by another user, and I'm going to go ahead and do is copy this text, and I'm just going to paste it right back into this document to represent a change that I have made to the document. So now we have two changes that have occurred to this document. Now I'll have the other user make a third change, and that'll be to the formatting of the text. So now we see that those changes made by the other user have been applied to the document. So let's go ahead and stop there because now we have enough changes to see how we can actually see change tracking taking place. By default, we don't have any text that tells us that changes have been made, although we can visually see that changes have been made, but if we want to see the specific changes, what we can enable is the reviewing pane. So with the reviewing pane, which can either be viewed vertical or horizontal, we can actually see what changes have been made. So for instance, we see that this text was entered, and we see that text was formatted as bold and italic, and it says that two revisions have been made. Now if we wanted to refresh to have the most up-to-date view of revisions, just in case we want to see if any more changes are being made, and we're not sure if the other user on the other end has communicated those to us, we can click on refresh reviewing pane, and any new changes would be shown here in the revision pane or the reviewing pane. Now by default, we see markup here. Now markup visually tells us that changes have been made to this document. And by default, we see simple markup. We can also view all markup, which gives us more details. So here we see a few seconds ago, the font was changed to bold and italic, and if there are even more changes, we would see even more of this markup. We can go to no markup, which would not tell us what changes have been made, or we can go to original, which shows us the original document. In this case, the original document was a blank document. In many cases, you'll want to have all markup selected so you can see exactly what changes were made. Alternatively, you can go to simple markup, but do make sure that you have one of the reviewing panes enabled for your document so you can see the changes in detail that have been made to your document. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for the next lesson where we will learn about accepting and rejecting changes from co-authors.

Advanced Provider : Eric Andal 4 Lessons · 17m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Urdu, Chinese

Course Description

Co-author functionality in Word allows for the creation of documents that incorporate contributions from a group of people—sometimes entire teams—working together. The end result is documents that contain a wealth of information communicated in a visually appealing way thanks to text, text options, pictures, charts, graphs, charts, and color options. But once the collective edits and revisions are complete, the co-authors must agree on the document’s final version. When that time comes, users need ways to streamline the process and put restrictions in place to finalize documents. Microsoft Word gives you the power to finalize a document and prevent further additions or edits by co-authors. Learn how to track any changes made to a document and compare between different revisions of the same document, how to accept or reject each change one at a time or all at once, then take steps to protect and completely finalize a document for publication.

What You'll Learn

Track the changes made to a document before finalizing it
Accept and reject changes from co-authors one at a time or all at once
Compare different revisions of the same document
Protect and finalize documents to prevent further additions or edits

Key Takeaways

Co-author functionality in Word lets groups and entire teams contribute to a single document together.
Once collective edits and revisions are complete, co-authors must agree on the document's final version.
Microsoft Word lets you finalize a document and prevent further additions or edits by co-authors.
Tracked changes can be accepted or rejected either one at a time or all at once.
Finalizing a document includes protecting it and preparing it for publication.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I learn in this course?

You will learn how to track changes made to a document, accept and reject co-author changes, compare different document versions, and protect and finalize documents.

Who is this course for?

It is for people working with Microsoft Word documents that incorporate contributions from groups or entire teams of co-authors who need to streamline and finalize the final version.

What topics do the lessons cover?

The lessons cover tracking changes before finalizing a document, accepting and rejecting changes from co-authors, comparing documents, and protecting and finalizing a document.

What skills does this course help build?

It builds skills in Microsoft Word, word processing, document management, document production, document review, and legal document revision.

How does Word help finalize a document?

Word gives you the power to finalize a document and prevent further additions or edits by co-authors, including accepting or rejecting each change and protecting the document for publication.