How to Use Track Changes in Microsoft Word: Step-by-Step Guide

A comprehensive tutorial on enabling, using, and reviewing Track Changes in Word, perfect for essay editing and collaborative projects.

Why use Track Changes?

Track Changes in Microsoft Word is essential for collaborative editing. It highlights additions, deletions, and formatting changes, allowing authors and reviewers to see each other’s contributions clearly.

Step 1: Enable Track Changes

Open your Word document.
Go to the Review tab in the Ribbon.
Click on Track Changes. The button will appear highlighted when active.

Tip: You can also press Ctrl+Shift+E (Windows) or Command+Shift+E (Mac) to toggle Track Changes on and off.

Step 2: Make edits with Track Changes enabled

Once Track Changes is active, any insertion, deletion, or formatting change is recorded. Additions are underlined or colored, deletions appear with strikethroughs, and formatting changes are noted in the margin.

Example: Adding the sentence "This study focuses on modern editing tools." will show as underlined in the document.
Deleting "The report was incomplete." will appear with a strikethrough.

Step 3: Customize Track Changes view

Word offers several ways to view tracked changes:

Simple Markup: Shows clean text with indicators for edits.
All Markup: Displays all edits inline with balloons for comments.
No Markup: Hides changes for a clean view without accepting or rejecting them.
Original: Shows the document as it was before edits.

You can access these options under the Review → Tracking → Display for Review dropdown.

Step 4: Adding comments

Comments allow you to provide feedback without altering the text:

Select the text you want to comment on.
Click New Comment in the Review tab.
Type your feedback in the comment box that appears in the margin.

Step 5: Review and accept or reject changes

After edits are complete, you can review each change:

Go to the Review tab.
Click Next to jump to the next tracked change.
Use Accept or Reject to finalize or discard the edit.

Tip: You can also accept/reject all changes at once by using the dropdown arrow under Accept/Reject.

Step 6: Finalizing the document

Once all changes are reviewed:

Turn off Track Changes.
Save the document with a new filename to preserve a copy with edits if needed.
Ensure all comments are resolved or deleted.

Before: Draft with multiple tracked changes and comments.
After: Final version with all changes accepted and comments resolved.

Extra tips for collaborative editing

Use different reviewer colors to distinguish edits by multiple authors.
Regularly save versions to avoid losing track of changes.
Encourage reviewers to add comments rather than rewriting sections entirely.
Combine Track Changes with Compare & Merge for multiple drafts.