The simple stuff can drive someone NUTS.



I realize this can be done by track changes and other means, but I want to do something very simple and can't find the solution. In the horse & buggy days of WordPerfect and so on this could be done, but I can't find a solution anywhere:

Suppose I have a document in black font sent by someone who doesn't understand track changes or comment boxes or highlighter, etc. I want to add some comments in red font so they stand out for this recipient when I send it to him. Of course I can type my comments in and change them to red, but that gets laborious. There HAS to be a setting I can use so that just newly inserted text is red and the existing text stays, black. Right???

if you don't want to use the Track changes mechanism, then try a character style. As far as I understand it, with option a) Word will brightly realise you're adding text and make it look different and with option b) it's up to you to tell Word a block of text is new.

I agree. You can use Track Changes and set it to display changes the way you want, or you can mark the text you add. The simplest way to do that is to use a character style, add that style to the QuickStyles pane, and click on it before you add anything. Of course this does not deal with deletions. You could have a character style to apply to things you want to delete as well, I suppose.

Perhaps, it may be time for your correspondent to learn to at least view tracked changes?

Thanks both -- I deal with quite a few different people with various levels of competency and when the occasional user unfamiliar with track changes gets into a marked-up document, needless to say, what they send back to me makes a train wreck look tidy.

I will try to suggestions you've offered.

I sympathise! I've even prepared a little note for reviewers suggesting how to get less unreadable results; essentially, think before you type – now there's a radical concept! – and mark up larger blocks (where possible) rather than a word here and there in the same phrase. When I'm editing, I often send back an interim version with original/edited side by side in a table …

@Charles – away from Word, I use conditional text and turn off display of deleted blocks/remove highlighting from new blocks once the changes are no longer important; in Word, I guess I could adjust the Deleted character style to 'hidden text' for similar behaviour. (I have about twenty releases of a regulatory document in a single source-file, and could go back to and adjust show/hide conditions to reproduce any release; easier, of course, to check the row of binders and pull out the appropriate hard copy, but traceability was a requirement)