My company uses Word exclusively, and track changes extensively. Here's some things I've learned:
1. Set up keyboard shortcuts for "AcceptChangesSelected," "RejectChangesSelected," "NextChangeOrComment," "PreviousChangeOrComment," and "InsertAnnotation" (i.e., a comment). Go to tools>customize, click the "keyboard" button, select "all commands" from the categories menu (I don't remember what category these are in), find the above commands, and set up shortcuts using the window. This speeds review immensely by reducing the need to use the mouse.
2. Experiment with the different views you can access from the "revisions" toolbar. I usually have insertions/deletions show up inline with comments and formatting changes showing up as balloons. I also toggle between "final showing markup" and "final" views when I need to make sure a revision didn't introduce extra spacing, letters, or punctuation.
@Tom Clarke: GREGH's solution might work, but only if you can control/assign who uses what color. Many of the documents I work on get touched by anywhere between 2 and 10 external people, none of whom would take kindly to me dictating how they set up their word processor. If you can't control who uses what color, the system won't work at all, and (echoing GREGH's comments), I haven't tested this, but changing colors in the options menu might change all of a particular type of revision show up as a certain color, for the entire document. Let us know what you find out.

bigvince1981

Track changes is an integral part of our QA program for engineering documents which have to go through checks at various levels of rigor.

Andronicus1717

Unfortunately, what some people have not really picked up on is that the track changes feature does not make you a better writer. And if you are not a good writer it won't turn you into one. Track changes enables people to think/imagine they are editing a document. I have had to doctor some documents that became _very_ ugly after too many people who had "discovered" track changes decided to throw in their editorial 2-cents.

A good tool does not always make you better at what you do (or think you can do).

nat lyon

I use Track Changes in Word, but when there are a lot of small edits the document can become very cumbersome to read, sometimes almost impossible. Some automatically generated items such as table of contents can become very messy indeed, with insignificant changes crowding the margins as page numbers change, etc.

In the end, the document owner still has to read over all the suggestions, then accept and finalize the input from others one by one. It is never automatic or cut-and-dry, it is people and their uncomfortable relationship with words and writing. Attempting to parse the "best" suggestions from the jumble left by Track Changes is not always easy or fast.

For most collaborative writing efforts in my work, we use 37Signals Basecamp with Writeboards. Much easier to read the changes for all and formatting isn't the huge pitfall that it can be in Word. Once the language is settled, formatting can easily be applied by the document owner in a coherent fashion. This avoids the inconsistent application of styles and "style look-alikes" that plague untold millions of Word docs.

Word does a lot, but its day in the sun has come and gone. There are too many other good ideas out there, and the ONLY thing that keeps me using Word (Mac and Win) is the stubborn ubiquity of the DOC format. Aside from that, my interest is gone and Microsoft is unlikely to provide any reasons to change that.

Track that change, Ballmer.

bradpdx

Even though tracking changes has been around for years and years (I used it to help people with papers and essays when I tutored writing in college), back in high school when I was a proofreader at a law firm, the lawyers insisted on printing out the 100+ page documents and having us proof by hand. Longest summer of my LIFE.

These days, it depends. If I'm given an essay or paper to read (still have lots of friends still in college who zip over a little late-night homework once in a while), I'll use track changes. However, for collaborative work, I like online documents. Google Docs lets you write together (always fun because you can see the progress other people are making on their sections while you write yours) but my favorite is to make a wiki-document. Media-wiki lets you backtrack through history and see the changes other people make to your section, plus you can divide into sections and it's all managed so well... it's a program that is DESIGNED for having many hands touch the same work.

CWW

@ TOM CLARKE:

This is not ideal, but if you go into Options/Track Changes, you can set the colours that you wish to marks changes with. Instead of the default "by author", you could set your colors to blue, tell Editor 2 to set these all to red, Editor 3 to set them all as green, etc. This ~should~ work, but I haven't tested it extensively. Let me know if you give it a shot.

Of course, the logical thing would be for this to happen automatically, but, well, you know...

GregH

And the Track Changes feature is even more useful in an 100% Outlook Exchange environment. You can send a document around to multiple Exchange users in turn for each to add his or her changes. Just open a Word document and choose (in Office 2003) File > Send to > Mail Recipient (for Review). When Outlook's compose message window opens, enter the email addresses of all the reviewers in the To: field.

When you send your message, the document goes to the first reviewer with Track Changes turned on automatically (if it wasn't already). Then when that user goes to close the document, they are asked if they are done and if so the doucument will be automatically routed to the next reviewer in the chain (using Outlook in the background).

When all reviewers are done, the document gets routed back to you with everyone's changes embedded. Word will even ask you if you want to merge this reviewed version with the original version on your hard drive that you sent out.

Very useful for group editing scenarios.

achecht

We've been using it recently as the responsibilities for RFP's has been disseminated amongst a group of people, and this feature (along with a standardized naming convention) tends to help track everything going on in a document and all that changes.

All that said, I still can't help but feel it could have been executed better. And personally, I feel that auto-text and TOC are the best features in word, but that's just me.

brianjgeraghty

Yeah, this is one of the best features in Word. Excellent for collaborative work. Has anyone ever figured out how to make sure that one editor/user always has the same colour for their comments, editions and additions? So if I'm chief editor (which I am), how can I make sure that my changes always appear in blue, but editor 2's changes always appear in red, and editor 3's in green... I spent some time looking at this but never found a solution.

Oh, and is that a real page from your book? If so, "Like Google Web search, Google Desktop search displays..." reads much better than "As does Google Web search, Google Desktop search displays...".

Tom Clarke

We use track changes in my office all the time. Even the non-tech-savvy know how to use it.

Must disagree with your assessment of the feature as being one that redeems Word, though. Track Changes is quite buggy. Randomly, things will not show up in certain views--for instance, you might have Word set to show all changes highlighted, but some changes just aren't visible at all.

Word is way too expensive for it to suck this much.

Every time I use Word at work, I wish we would just go to plain-text editors with markup language for formatting, and use CVS or Subversion, combined with diff, for real track changes functionality. Word just tries to do too much, and the result is that it is not good at anything it does and is quite buggy at a lot of what it does.

Unfortunately Word is the standard so we are stuck with it even though it is a steaming pile of crap.

massysett

And, since LaTeX is text, you can track changes with revision control software (such as subversion). For those who are afraid to take the plunge, LyX has change tracking abilities.

sciencedude

But, isn't LaTeX more efficient in writing huge documents like your book? I get frustrated in managing the images in Word.

kaushalmodi

Here at the Federal Government, I help a lot of people revise drafts of letters (you have no idea what it takes to get a cabinet level secretary's signature on anything, just writing wise), and as a teaching tool, I use comments and track changes so they can understand the difference between the submission and the revision(s). Also a good way to have a conversation about content, remotely.

Have seen it used, extensively, in the approval of new regulations (the operational implementation of laws) in the Federal Register. Comments from multiple lawyers and program experts, with version tracking done by the "author" of the reg. I imagine it gets used in Congress for legislation as well.

PotKettleBlack

@David Hunter: This has been a problem for the white house, too, when metadata showed they had edited documents supposedly written by "business groups" in favor of privatizing social security. Fortunately for all of us Word 2007 has a feature to remove hidden metadata. Go to Prepare -> Inspect Document.

person_x

NICE! Thank you!
My boss and I were just talking about our need for change tracking in Excel. After reading this post, I thought that Excel would probably have the same feature (since it is part of the MS Office suite), and it does. I had to search around to find the feature for both programs (I couldn't find the "Reviewing" toolbar), so for everyone else's benefit, it's listed in the "Tools" drop-down menu (at least, in Word/Excel 2000).

KMT

Still with Microsoft Word? Open Office is much nice. Still if you have to stay with MS Word then if you are an academic then don't use track changes. I've had several bad experiences collaborating on papers where when it came to the uploading of the articles to the journals their automatic pdf converters managed to unhide the tracked changes and/or do other weird things with them... And ultimately the only thing to do to recover the document was to copy and paste it into plain txt then paste it into a new document, then add all the formatting back in... Not fun.

David Hunter

It seems to me that assigning colors to individuals might be hard, as you have to remember then who is assigned what color. I just hover my cursor over the change, and the balloon shows you the author of that change. Easier then messing with a color code scheme if you ask me.

jimmymac8088

@GregH: The "assign custom colors" thing works OK, but it rapidly becomes confusing if Editor 1, Editor 2, and Editor 3 change; This happened to me when I had two documents going to different groups of people.

I'd really like to see a word processor that uses a wiki-style markup language. And for something like "Track Changes" it would use the HTML INS and DEL tags. That would be awesome.

mb

I second BRADPDX. Often Track Changes is too cumbersome when there are many minor changes. It can work well for final edits, but pass the document around too many times or to too many people, and it becomes impossible to read.

When I am updating a document to a new version, I use the "Compare and Merge" feature to show the differences between versions.

abar65

@David Hunter: Same here with converting to pdf or other formats - tracking changes always leads to problems.

@PotKettleBlack: While most of my work flows from the CFR and not the other way around. I know what you mean. Too many hands counter much the the power of tracking changes.

zolielo

Yeah, I had considered the manual approach. I'll take a look at it next time we have to work on a document like that. Thanks for the replies!

Tom Clarke

LaTeX and diff, preferably built into a VCS, all the way.

The 'Track Changes' seems almost... an afterthought, one that the team spent little time on. The many little changes issue mentioned above is just an example.

SohumB