In some companies if you are negotiating contracts you may have a software program to manage and track changes to the documents as they are negotiated. For those that don’t have those programs, Word™ has certain functionality that you should know about and be able to use.
First, you can set the document up to track changes so that Word™ automatically highlights the change.
To do that under the Tools pull down menu you click on “Track Changes”
You have three options on how the changes will be shown. One uses the Balloons that appear in the margins showing the change. A second provides a red line version of the changes with items inserted highlighted and items deleted showing strikethroughs.
The third option is to use the Balloons only for comments and formatting, where all other changes are shown as red-line.
To select the one you want to use you click on the Tools pull down menu and under “Options” click on the “Track Changes” page. In the Balloons section select which of those three you prefer. My opinion is Balloons makes it harder to see what is being changed and where, especially if there are many changes.
Once you receive a document with changes the easiest way to work with that is by adding the “Reviewing” pain to your Word™ Buttons.
To add the Reviewing Button you click on the Toolbar Options Button that is dark and has a downward facing triangle on the bottom.
Select “Customize” and click on the Button “reviewing”.
When you turn on the reviewing functionality it will add a number of buttons to the toolbar that help you navigate through the changes.
To use the functionality you highlight the word, words or section you want to accept or reject. You can do that several ways:
- By clicking on your mouse and holding it down and dragging it over the change.
- Double clicking on an individual word will highlight the word
The Button that looks like a sheet of paper with a Pen with a left facing arrow when clicked will move you back to the last change.
The Button that looks like a sheet of paper with a Pen with a right facing arrow when clicked will move you forward to the next change in the document.
The Button that looks like a sheet of paper with a Pen with a check mark on it when clicked will accept that change.
The downward arrow to the right of the Accept Change Button provides additional functionality in accepting changes. For example, if you highlighted a paragraph with multiple changes in the paragraph you can click on accept all changes shown.
If you want to accept all changes to the document, it allows you to do that such as when the document with all the changes represents the final agreement of the parties and you want to produce a clean document for signature.
The Button that looks like a sheet of paper with a Pen with a RED X on it is the Reject Changes Button and when clicked will reject that change.
The downward arrow to the right of the Reject Changes Button allows additional reviewing functionality.
The Yellow button that looks like a file folder with a star on it is the Comments Button and allows you to insert a comment in the document such as why the change is not acceptable.
The Button in the Reviewing Pane that includes an upward arrow is the reviewing pane. If you click on that it will provide a split screen of the document that highlights the change and who made the change and when it was made.
There are additional things that you do need to be aware of in using Word™. For example, if you sent out the contract internally for review all the changes made will still be retained by Word™ even though you have used the reviewing tool to accept or reject them. To prevent the Supplier from seeing those internal changes, simply do a save as on the document to another file name and that will eliminate the history.
Word™ has several other tools that you can use as part of the negotiation process.
On the tool bar there is a “display for review” Button that allows you to view the original, the original showing markup, the final and the final showing mark-up. If you want to see all the changes that have been made, click on original showing mark-up.
In the Print functionality you can also decide which version of the document you want to print. For example sometimes there could be a dispute over who made a certain change. If you click on Print and in the area that says “Print What” if you select “List of Mark-up” what will be printed is all the changes that were made, when they were made and who made them.
The last tool you can use to make sure that you are seeing all the changes that have been made can also be found on Tools pull down menu. If you click on the Compare and Merge Documents it allows you to electronically compare the documents for changes.
Here’s how to do it.
In the current document that is under negotiation click on accept all changes and do a save as to a new file name. This keeps your original document untouched.
Open the new document; make sure track changes button is off. Then click on Compare and Merge documents and Select the Original document that was sent to the Supplier before any changes were made. Word™ will show the differences between the two and will show any changes that may have been made to the document with the track changes functionality turned off. Print out that document and use that to compare to your current document in negotiation to ensure that it represents a correct picture of what has been changed
An on line Microsoft course on using the functionality is available at
http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC011600131033
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