At the Writers’ Exchange, we honor the writer’s authority on the manuscript. As a result, WEX Editors use Tracking Changes for their in-text corrections and comments. If you’re working with a document that has been reviewed by a WEX editor, try opening the “Review Pane” (found when you click on the Review tab in Word). A sidebar including all comments will appear and facilitate your viewing of the comments. Printing this Review Pane is another step to ease your self-editing/correcting of your document.

When a document has been edited using Track Changes, you must take the extra step to “Accept” or “Reject” all changes and comments. If not, they will persist in appearing regardless of saving what you might think is a fresh document. Here’s some advice to help you move from “Tracking Changes” to a finalized version.

When working with tracked changes and/or comments to a document, you’re going to want to access the “review” section of MS Word. In more recent versions, this means clicking the “review” tab on the MS Office Ribbon; in older versions, this means clicking on the “review” menu.

At this point, you have multiple options regarding the “tracked changes”:

  • You can accept the current change we have selected, or you can “accept all” (you may have to click the accept button and select “all” as an option).
  • Once a change has been accepted, the document will be modified in the way the change indicated, and the highlighting/underlining will disappear.
  • Your editor has probably added comments along with the corrections. We strongly recommend that you read all comments before deleting them. To delete comments individually, simply click on each and scroll up to “delete comment.” To accept all comments, you repeat the above action, with a minor change. This time, you click the “delete” button under comments. Again, you can delete one individual comment or you can select “all” and remove all comments from the document. If you want to delete all comments, click on the first one and then scroll to “delete comment.” An option to delete all appears. Your success should be obvious, as the comment pane of the document should disappear.
  • As a final measure, double check to ensure that you have saved a clean version of your document. Click “Accept All” changes. Then, save as Final and “Turn OFF” Track changes.
  • Save the document, and as a final, pre-emptive step, open the fresh document to ensure that all revisions are absent.
  • For more detailed information on track changes in specific versions of Microsoft Word, visit the online help pages
  • To delete changes or comments