The “track changes” function of Microsoft Word is a very useful tool for editors and people who work on documents in teams. With it you can keep a record of who made what changes and when they were made.
If only one person is working on a particular document at a time, it is easy just to keep “track changes” on and have the document sent to the next person (serial editing case). However, sometimes it is necessary to send a document out to a number of people (parallel editing case), and when they all send their versions of the document back, you face the problem of trying to put everything back into a single document that reflects the changes suggested by all of the editors.
One way to do this is to copy and paste the revised text back into your original document. You may have tried this before and found that copying and pasting didn’t preserve the record of changes. There is a trick to making this work.
Copying Text and Preserving the Record of Changes
Turn “track changes” OFF in the source document.
Turn “track changes” OFF in the target document.
Copy from the source document to the target document.
Copying Text and Removing the Record of Changes
Turn “track changes” ON in the source document.
Turn “track changes” OFF in the target document.
Copy from the source document to the target document.
