Anything added is underlined, anything deleted is struck through, and any formatting changes are noted with a dotted line out into the margin, where a little bubble informs you of the change made. (If you know how to use Tracking Changes, go ahead and skip to the Time-Saving Trick heading.) When you open your document, you will notice colored changes-usually red-throughout your document. For the purposes of this post, let’s assume that you are the author and that you have just gotten a marked-up draft back from your editor. Whether you already know how to use Tracking Changes or not, I hope you’ll learn something in this tutorial.

The author can view the editor’s changes and use a tool in Word to either accept or reject these changes. What this means is that authors and editors can communicate by email, sending versions of the document back and forth until it’s complete. The days of writing in red pen all over hard copies of documents are largely gone. As many of you probably know, editors usually use Microsoft Word’s Tracking Changes feature to mark their editing changes.