For this week’s Roundup: several reasons you might not want to employ Microsoft Word’s Track Changes feature the next time you redline a document, getting under the hood with Word Options (even if you’re not a techie), another way to save Outlook email as a pdf (in case you want to take it with you on your iPad or other mobile device), and one possible reason your line spacing changes won’t stick in Word (a problem several of you have reported to me). Let’s get it started:
Track Changes
If you send documents out for review electronically, this guest post I’ve done over at Attorney at Work is a must-read. It’s a checklist of actions you need to make sure you’ve taken prior to attaching a Word document to an email and hitting the “Send” button. Before you start that next round of revisions, read through this and familiarize yourself with Microsoft Word’s security settings designed to combat potentially compromising metadata.
The full article can be found here.
There’s a whole host of ways you can make the various Microsoft Office applications easier to use. In fact, most users don’t take full advantage of the options for customizing these applications to make the Office suite work better for them.
Today, we’re going to talk about one of the easiest customizations: the Status Bar. Look at the bottom of any Office application and you’ll see a bar just above the Windows Taskbar at the bottom (like this example from Word 2007):
(If you need to see the above a bit bigger, click on it for a full-sized version. Go on — I’ll wait here.)
Most users don’t know they can change the information listed on the task bar in any Office application (except Outlook, unfortunately). And it’s really easy:
1) Right-click your mouse anywhere on the status bar.
2) Select the option(s) you want (check marks on this example from Word 2007 indicate the option is already selected and showing up on the Status Bar):
I recommend, for example, always turning on the Track Changes indicator, and I personally think the Word Count is a handy piece of information to have. Feel free to experiment with adding or deleting features — you won’t mess up your document!
3) Once you’ve made your choices, click elsewhere on the screen to close the Customize Status Bar menu and save your changes.
That’s it! (That may be the easiest Word task you’ll do all day!)
Now, why is this important? Here are some scenarios to consider:
1) Someone’s sent you a document to review/revise and left Track Changes on, so when you start typing, Word starts redlining the document. With the status bar set to show the status of Track Changes, you can simply click on that section once to turn it off. That’s much simpler (and faster) than going to the Review tab, dropping down the Track Changes menu, and turning it off there.
2) You’ve imported some text from WordPerfect and notice that the headers and footers mysteriously change mid-document. Why? The status bar gives you a clue: the section numbers at the left keep changing. (Text imported from WordPerfect often embeds random section breaks into a document, which can affect the headers and footers.) How much time would you have otherwise spent trying to troubleshoot that problem?
3) Ever wanted to get a quick sum or count of highlighted cells in Excel without creating a formula? Change the status bar to show Count and Sum. You can also get quick calculations of Averages, Minimums and Maximums in the status bar.
So, what items would you want to see in the status bar? Tell me about ‘em in the comments below.
After you’ve redlined a document using Track Changes (and maybe even inserted some comments and printed some review copies) you’ll need to accept or reject the various marked changes in order to finalize the document. Here’s how.
What if you (or your attorney) don’t want to actually change a particular section of a document, but just want to ask a question, point out a problem, just plain make a comment? Word’s Track Changes feature can help you do that.
Once you know how to turn on Word’s Track Changes feature, you may want to be able to see the document in its original state and with all the changes without having to accept or reject changes. Here’s an easy way to do that (with some caveats):
If you want to be able to track what changes have been made to a document, then you want to use the Word feature called (big surprise here) Track Changes.
Here’s a little tutorial on how to turn on Track Changes in Word 2002 and 2003, plus some notes about the feature’s little quirks you’ll want to watch out for.
The case of the shrunken comment balloon
by The Guru · 4 comments
And now for a dispatch from the “Well, I’ve never seen this before” Department … Just when I thought I had seen it all, my boss threw me a curve ball, courtesy of his new-found affection for Microsoft Word’s Track Changes feature.
He’s been using Track Changes a lot lately, and it’s turned out to be a pretty handy feature for him, since he’s been doing a lot of contract work. Marked-up documents have been flying back and forth via e-mail, and the Microsoft Word Track Changes feature has made life a lot easier for him.
Until last week, that is. He was getting ready to send out another reviewed document, when he opened it up from his outgoing e-mail and saw something like this:
Yikes! Who could possibly read that? That comment balloon is way too small!
Click to continue…