Office 2011 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Working Collaboratively

Whether you’re collaborating with a coauthor or reviewing someone else’s manuscript, Word makes it easy to communicate as you edit. In precomputing days, editing a paper document resulted in a jumble of red pen marks, crossed out text, and notes scrawled in the margins. If several people reviewed a document, figuring out who said what was a nightmare. Word resolves those issues by keeping track of all changes and all reviewers. Word stores everything in the document file and, with a click of your mouse, you can show or hide the comments and edits.

This chapter looks at the reviewing process from all angles. You learn all about comments: how to insert comments into a document, how to manage reviewers comments, how to make audio comments, and how to accept or reject changes made by others. You’ll even learn how to protect parts of your document, when several people are working on it at the same time. Finally, you’ll learn how to combine and compare two documents so only the right parts make it to the final draft.

Adding Comments

Collaborating is all about clear communication, so Word lets you attach easy-to-read comments directly to the text you’re referring to. Go to Insert→Insert New Comment. What could be clearer? It’s even easier to add comments with the Review tab on the Ribbon. The “Add a comment about the selection” button is the very first item, as you can see in Figure 8-1. Even better, for documents with several reviewers, Word keeps track ...