Collaboration Features

In office environments, a document is often the product of multiple people. In the old days, a draft document would be printed and circulated among reviewers. Along the way, it would be marked up with colored ink and covered with sticky notes full of comments. Some poor soul would have to make sense of all the markups and notes to create a clean document. The process was time consuming and was sometimes repeated through several drafts to fine-tune the document for publication.

Microsoft Word, which is widely used in office environments, includes features that make the collaboration process quicker and easier and help protect documents from unauthorized access and changes:

• Properties stores information about the document's creator and contents.

• Comments enables reviewers to enter notes about the document.

• Versions enables reviewers to save multiple versions of the same document. At any time, you can revert to a previous version.

• Change Tracking enables reviewers to edit the document while keeping the original document intact. Changes can be accepted or rejected to finalize the document.

• Document Protection limits how a document can be changed.