Word’s Track Changes feature is great for receiving comments and edits on a piece of writing, but what if you have two or more critiques to review? It’s quite easy to merge all your critiques into one document with each editor’s changes, suggestions, and comments highlighted in a different colour and labelled with their name or initials. Always make backup copies of your documents, though, just in case. Select one critiqued manuscript to be your base document and save it with a filename that reflects this status. In Word 2007/10: Click Review, Compare, Combine In Word 2003: Tools, Compare and Merge Documents... Select your base document in the first box and the next critique in the second box. You can either use your name, or a term like “Auto” to assign to the unmarked changes. This simply means that anything that Word needs to change, such as reinserting a word that one reviewer has deleted, will be labelled with this term. Combine or merge documents - Word 2007 Wor...

This post was previously published here at the Blood-Red Pencil, but it, along with many of our earliest posts, is so useful for writers that we are featuring the best "oldies but goodies" during the month of December. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Track Changes and Comments features of a word processing program are very useful for editing or critiquing either your own or another writer's manuscript. Here is a guide to using these features. Using Track Changes in MS Word Tools, Track Changes Or Double click TRK on the Status Bar Track Changes can be used to keep a note of changes you make to a document, particularly if you are not certain you want to keep the changes. It is very useful if you’ve asked another person to edit or comment on your work, and you wish to review their changes before accepting them. Comments The Insert Comment option is available on the Reviewing Toolbar that pops up when you select Tools, Track Changes . To hide the comments in a...