How to accept or reject Microsoft Word Track Changes on a Mac

Not everyone is familiar with Microsoft Word Track Changes; those pesky, colorful edits, comments, and balloons can be hard to get rid of and work with. That’s why we created this video. I’ll quickly teach you everything you need to know about dealing with track changes. This video is for Microsoft Word track changes on a Mac machine. If you’re on a Windows, we have a video for that too!

Would you rather read the video transcript? Have at it!

How to Accept or Reject Microsoft Word Track Changes for Mac

Microsoft Word Track Changes is a powerful editing function that easily displays edits, suggestions, and feedback that your Kibin editor makes to your document. However, if you aren’t familiar with the track changes feature, it can be a little intimidating and frustrating.

Rest assured, this short video will teach you everything you need to know to accept or reject track changes in Microsoft Word for a Mac. So lets get started.

When you open a document in Microsoft Word that contains edits in track changes, you should immediately see them within the text. Your display may be slightly different than mine, but you should see some sort of colored edits.

If for some reason you do not see the edits, you may be in a viewing mode that isn’t displaying them. Let’s navigate to the track changes “review” tab to see what that’s like.

Notice right now I am in the “final showing markup” mode. I can also view the document in “final” mode which displays the text as if all the edits made by your Kibin editor were accepted. I can also view the document in “original showing markup” mode which is slightly different than final showing markup. You’ll notice that, in this mode, things that were deleted by your editor appear with a strikeout, while in “final showing markup” mode they don’t show at all. Lastly, you can view the document in “original” mode, which is simply your unedited paper with the edits hidden. If you don’t immediately see your edits when you open your paper, make sure you aren’t viewing it in “final” or “original” mode as this will make the document appear that it contains no edits.

Let’s go back to “original showing markup” and start working through our edits.

There are several ways to accept or reject edits. You will have your own preference, but we’ll work through the different ways to do this.

One way is to accept or reject each change from the bubbles in the margin. This is easy to do, however, you will have to switch between viewing modes to be able to accept or reject each edit. For example, you’ll notice that the deletion of the word “Can” in the title doesn’t show up in the margin in “original with markup mode”. I need to switch to “final showing markup” to be able to see and accept the edit from the margin. This isn’t ideal.

An easier way is to make sure your cursor is at the beginning of the document and then click “next”. You’ll notice that this will highlight the first edit on the document. Now, it’s easy to either accept or reject the edit. Once you do, the cursor will move to the next edit and highlight it for you. Again, you can now accept or reject the edit. This is the best way to work through your edits one by one.

But if you want to speed things up a bit more, you may prefer to simply read through your document and reject any edits you don’t wish to keep. You can do this by simply right-clicking on the edit and rejecting it. Once you’ve worked your way through the entire document and you are satisfied with the edits that remain, you can choose to accept all edits from the top navigation. You’re now left with a clean, edited document unless of course your editor left comments.

If your Kibin editor left comments, you’ll also see these in the margin. They look just like normal edits. Again, you can delete each of these one by one, or you can use the top navigation to do it. Regardless of which way you choose, you’ll want to delete comments before sending your paper to someone else. If you do not, they will also be able to see the comments left by your editor.

Lastly, if you plan to make any changes to your paper, make sure to turn the track changes function off. If you don’t, you’ll be tracking your own changes when you type.... like this. To turn it off, just toggle the on/off button in the top navigation so when you type, you’re typing like you normally would be.

Remember, you can always download your edited document again from your Kibin dashboard. If you lose your copy, save over changes, or simply need to access the edited version some other time, we keep it stored for you so it’s always available. That’s all for how to work with edits in track changes. Thanks for watching!