Accepting or rejecting tracked changes in Write by Zaweba

Documents that come back from a colleague or a tutor often carry tracked changes. Somebody opened your .docx in another word processor, switched on change tracking and marked up their edits. Write by Zaweba opens those files, shows the changes and lets you settle all of them at once.

How tracked changes appear

Write shows tracked changes as coloured text, so you can see what has been added and what has been removed. It does not record new tracked changes itself. That is a deliberate choice: Write is a straightforward word processor for writing and finishing documents, and the review cycle with tracked edits belongs to the program your reviewer used.

What it does do is keep the changes safe. When you open a .docx with tracked changes and save it back as .docx, the changes are written out as they were, so the reviewer can still see and manage them in their own program.

Accept all and Reject all

When you have read through the edits and you are ready to finish, you have two choices. Accept all keeps every change: insertions become normal text, deletions disappear, and the document reads as the reviewer left it. Reject all throws every change away and returns the document to the text before the review.

Either one is done in a single undo step. If you accept everything and then spot a change you didn't want, one undo puts every tracked change back exactly as it was, and you can think again.

What is covered

Accept all and Reject all reach every kind of tracked change Write knows about. That includes inserted and deleted text, moved text, formatting changes and paragraph changes, such as a new style or alignment, and inserted and deleted table rows.

They also reach every part of the document, not just the main text. Changes in headers, footers, footnotes and comments are included. That matters, because a forgotten change tucked away in a footer can otherwise survive into the final copy.

A practical way to review

Read the document through with the changes showing. Coloured text makes it easy to see what the reviewer did. Make a note of any edits you disagree with.

If you agree with nearly everything, accept all, then fix the few points you disagree with by hand. If you disagree with most of it, reject all and make the handful of changes you liked yourself.

Before accepting or rejecting, consider keeping a copy. Save As under a new name preserves the marked up version, so you have a record of what was suggested.

Before sending a final copy

Tracked changes left in a document can cause embarrassment. A CV sent with a friend's comments still in it, or a report with deleted text hidden in the file, says more than you intended. Accept or reject everything before exporting the final PDF or sending the final .docx.

Comments are a separate matter. Write keeps comments in .docx files and writes them back unchanged. If you don't want them in the final copy, deal with them in the program that added them, or check the file before you send it.

Settling changes in one step is a small feature, but it closes the loop on a common task. You can take part in a review with people using other programs, then finish the document in Write without hunting for every last coloured word.