Hour 18. Collaborating on Documents

In today's office environments, people are increasingly abandoning red ink pens, highlighters , and post-it slips in favor of software tools that enable them to collaborate on documents without printing them out. For example, you can write the rough draft of a document in Word and send it to a colleague for review. Your colleague edits the document onscreen and then sends it to a second person, who adds more revisions before e-mailing the document back to you. After you receive the edited copy, you incorporate your colleagues' suggestions and finalize the document. In this hour, you learn how to use Word's collaboration tools and a few related features that come in handy when working on documents with other people. When you arrive at the sections on inserting comments and tracking changes to a document, keep in mind that Word uses the term markup to refer collectively to both of these features.

The highlights of this hour include

Using the highlighter to call attention to text
Inserting comments in a document
Tracking the changes made to a document
Protecting your document from revisions
Saving multiple versions of a document
Ensuring that your Word documents are compatible with older versions of Word