Chapter 8: Collaborating with Others

Overview

In this chapter you will learn to:

• Track and manage document changes.

• Add and review comments.

• Protect a document with a password.

• Prevent editing and formatting changes.

• Use e-mail to send a document for review.

• Compare and merge documents.

After you create a draft of a document, you might distribute it to your coworkers and ask for their comments and revisions. Collaborating with others in this way helps you produce accurate and thorough documents.

With Microsoft Office Word 2003, you can easily distribute a document to reviewers electronically so that they can read, revise, and comment on the document without printing it. For example, an assistant at The Garden Company might collaborate with the head buyer to revise a memo to the owner of the company. Reviewers edit the document using the Track Changes feature so that you can see what they’ve changed. Reviewers can also insert notes. You can review, accept, and reject changes and comments by using buttons on the Reviewing toolbar. If different reviewers have inserted changes and comments in different versions of the document, you can merge all the versions and then review them in a single document.

If you don’t want reviewers to edit your work, you can protect a document so that others can read but not change it. For greater protection, you can assign a password so that only people who know the password can open the document.

In this chapter, you will revise a memo and related documents. You will track changes, review comments, and accept and reject revisions. You will also protect a document with a password and set editing and formatting permissions for another document so that only authorized people can make changes to it. After sending the documents for review via e-mail, you will merge edited versions so that you can see all the changes and comments in one document.

See Also

Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Quick Reference entries on pages xlv-xlviii.

Important

On The CD Before you can use the practice files in this chapter, you need to install them from the book’s companion CD to their default location. See “Using the Book’s CD-ROM” on page xiii for more information.