How to Use Track Changes in Word 2010

PROOFREADING SERVICES ARE AVAILABLE ONLY FOR KSU PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS. If you use Macintosh, look for the video “Track Changes in Word for Mac” available on the same website. After emailing your paper to the KSU Psych Lab for review, you will receive a “revised_” copy in a return email. Upon opening that file, you will notice comments and corrections in the right margin. To get the most out of these revisions, this video will illustrate how to... customize your preferences in a Word 2007 or 2010 program. This is also an excellent tool to keep track of changes to your paper when working in a group. Begin by clicking on the Review tab in the Ribbon. The box on the far left includes tools such as Word Count and Spelling and Grammar Check. To the right of that are boxes for Comments, Tracking, and Changes. Turn Tracking on and off by clicking the Tracking button in the Tracking box. Click on the arrow below it to select Change Tracking Options, to customize how revisions appear in your documents. This will make reading revisions much easier. By default, Insertions and Deletions are the same color, but each reviewers revisions will be in a different color. Because revisions usually include replacing words and punctuation, a more useful setting is to use different colors for Insertions than for Deletions. An intuitive setting is Red for Deletions, and Blue (or Green) for Insertions You can also change how they appear in the Text. Effects such as underlining would prevent being able to see punctuation changes clearly, so set the text effects to Color Only. Comments and Formatting changes can also be set to different colors to draw your attention. Sometimes it is difficult to notice whether a change has been made, especially small changes like punctuation marks. To make them easier to spot, Changed Lines can be marked in the Left Margin. When you finish setting your preferences, click OK. You will now see an example of what Track Changes look like as they are made. Deletions will show up in Red Font (as we set). Format changes show up in Green text boxes in the right margin. Added text will show up in Blue Font (as we set). Notice the short lines that appear in the left margin to indicate where changes have been made. Comments and Format changes both appear in text boxes in the right margin (you can change where they appear in Options). You can also select Deletions to show up in the right margin with Comments and Format changes, rather than in the text. This may help draw attention to Deletions that are difficult to notice. Make sure to set your preferences in Options so that they are intuitive for you to read. Click Show Markup to control which types of revisions appear (Deletions, Comments, etc.)... (e.g., you may want to show corrections, but hide comments). (e.g., you may want to show corrections, but hide comments). You can also control whose revisions appear, individually or altogether. In the top right of the Tracking box, notice the default setting is to show the Final document, including any markups. To show your original document (before any changes were made), select Original. Likewise, the Final view will show the final document (after all changes were made). If you see in the left or right margin that a change has been made, but you can’t tell what the change is... try switching between the Original and Final views. Although you can highlight a change and click Accept or Reject in the Changes box, this would be PLAGIARIZING the reviewer’s work. Furthermore, you wouldn’t learn from your mistakes. Rather, view the “revised_” file while making corrections to your own original Word file. Most important: ALWAYS keep your APA (2010) Publication Manual next to you as you work.