How to Use Track Changes in Microsoft Word
Track Changes is one of Microsoft Word's most powerful collaboration features — and one of the most misunderstood. Whether you're editing a colleague's report, reviewing a student's essay, or co-authoring a legal document, knowing how Track Changes actually works (and how to control it) makes the difference between clean collaboration and a chaotic mess of conflicting edits.
What Track Changes Does
When you enable Track Changes, Word stops silently accepting your edits. Instead, it records every insertion, deletion, formatting change, and comment as a marked revision. Each reviewer's changes appear in a distinct color, and nothing is permanently applied until someone explicitly accepts or rejects each change.
This creates a full audit trail — useful in legal, academic, publishing, and business workflows where accountability and version control matter.
How to Turn Track Changes On and Off
In Word for Windows and Mac:
- Open your document
- Go to the Review tab in the ribbon
- Click Track Changes — it toggles on (highlighted) or off
Keyboard shortcut:
- Windows:
Ctrl + Shift + E - Mac:
Cmd + Shift + E
When active, you'll see a small indicator in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. It's easy to forget it's running, so always check before sending a document.
Understanding the Markup View Options 🔍
Word gives you four ways to display tracked changes, and this is where most people get confused:
| View Mode | What You See |
|---|---|
| All Markup | Every tracked change, visible inline with colored markup |
| Simple Markup | A clean view with red change bars in the margin; click to reveal edits |
| No Markup | Document appears as if all changes are accepted (they're still there) |
| Original | Document as it looked before any tracked changes |
No Markup does not delete the tracked changes — it just hides them. This catches people out when they send a "clean" document that still contains tracked revisions underneath.
How to Accept or Reject Changes
Once reviewing is done, someone needs to resolve each marked edit. You can do this one at a time or all at once.
To accept or reject individual changes:
- Right-click any marked edit and choose Accept or Reject
- Or use the Accept / Reject buttons in the Review ribbon
To accept all changes at once:
- Review tab → click the dropdown arrow under Accept → Accept All Changes
To reject all changes:
- Same dropdown under Reject → Reject All Changes
Be deliberate here. Accepting all changes at once is permanent — Word won't keep a backup of the original markup unless you've saved a separate version.
Working with Comments vs. Tracked Edits
Track Changes and Comments are related but distinct:
- Tracked changes record actual edits to the text
- Comments are notes attached to a section of text, stored in the margin, without altering the document content
Comments are useful when a reviewer wants to flag something without editing it directly — asking a question, flagging a factual check, or suggesting a structural change. Both appear under the Review tab and can be managed together or separately.
Controlling Who Can Modify Track Changes Settings
In shared or sensitive documents, you may not want collaborators turning off Track Changes. Word lets you lock the feature with a password:
- Review tab → Track Changes dropdown → Lock Tracking
- Set a password
With locking enabled, Track Changes stays on and cannot be disabled without the password. This is common in legal review workflows and formal editorial processes.
Variables That Affect Your Experience 🖥️
How Track Changes behaves in practice depends on several factors:
Word version: Features and UI placement vary between Word 2016, 2019, Microsoft 365, and the web version of Word. The web app has a more limited implementation — some formatting change tracking and certain lock features may not be available.
File format: Track Changes works most reliably in .docx format. Saving as .doc, .rtf, or .pdf can strip or corrupt revision markup. Always confirm the file format before sharing reviewed documents.
Number of reviewers: With multiple collaborators, Word assigns each person a different markup color. Managing many rounds of tracked edits from several reviewers can become visually complex — and the order in which changes are accepted matters.
Cloud vs. local editing: In Microsoft 365 with OneDrive, multiple people can edit simultaneously with changes tracked in real time. In desktop Word with a locally stored file, edits are tracked per session and reconciled when the file is merged or shared. These are meaningfully different workflows.
Operating system: The Mac version of Word has minor interface differences from the Windows version. Core functionality is equivalent, but keyboard shortcuts and some menu structures differ.
A Note on Hidden Tracked Changes
One underappreciated risk: tracked changes can remain in a document without being visible. If you send a document in No Markup view, the recipient can switch to All Markup and see your full edit history, comments, and any deleted text.
Before sharing any document externally, use File → Info → Check for Issues → Inspect Document to find and remove hidden tracked changes, comments, and personal metadata. This is especially important in professional or sensitive contexts.
The Spectrum of Use Cases
A student proofreading their own draft before submission has very different needs than a legal team managing multi-party contract redlines. A solo blogger editing a post in Word Online operates on different constraints than a publishing team passing a manuscript through three editorial rounds.
The core mechanics of Track Changes stay the same, but how you configure markup views, manage reviewer permissions, handle file formats, and ultimately clean the document before final use — all of that shifts depending on your workflow, who else is involved, and what Word version everyone is running. ✏️