Sharing Documents
Word is often used in a business environment with groups of users who need to work together. To accommodate the need for users to create documents as a team, Word has workgroup features that make it easier to track and protect changes in documents.
Tracking Revisions
When more than one person can make changes to a document, pandemonium can ensue. The surest way to maintain the integrity of a document is to ensure that changes—if they're allowed at all—are clearly identified so that anyone reviewing the edited document can trace specific changes back to their originator. That's at the heart of Word's Track Changes (frequently called "Revision tracking") capability.
When Word tracks changes made to a document, text that is added, deleted, or modified is marked to emphasize the changes made. You can subsequently go through those changes, one at a time, and accept or reject them.
To have Word track changes made to a document, choose Tools, Track Changes, or double-click the grayed-out TRK button on the Status bar. That brings up the Reviewing Toolbar, and changes made from that point on are explicitly shown by Word.
The Reviewing Toolbar (which can be moved anywhere on the screen, see Figure 15.18) gives you one convenient location for working with all document changes. In particular, the toolbar lets you look at any of the following:
Figure 15.18. If Word has been told to track changes, you can review the changes easily, one at a time, with this dialog box.
Original— What the document looked like before Change Tracking was turned on.
Original Showing Markup— Shows the original document, with insertions noted in a manner similar to comments, out in the right margin, and deletions marked with an overstrike.
Final Showing Markup— The final state of the document, inserted text appearing as underlined and deleted text noted in the margin.
Shifting back and forth among the different views gives you a quick idea of the effect of changes.
On the Reviewing Toolbar, you'll find icons for jumping from revision to revision, accepting or rejecting individual changes as you go. There's also an icon for making your own comments, in case you need to follow up on a change, and for bringing up a pane that lists changes in order. Overall, it's a powerful and useful feature.
Tip from 
The trick, of course, is to ensure that all the people working on a document have Word track changes. Otherwise, their changes won't be explicitly shown, and you'll have to go through the additional step of comparing your original document with their modified versions to figure out what has changed. To force everyone making changes to a document to have Word track their changes, choose Tools, Protect Document, check the Tracked Changes button, enter an optional password, and click OK. From that point on, anyone who opens the document (except you) has to allow Word to track changes.
If you didn't set Word to track revisions, and somebody has made changes to a document, you still have one last resort, a feature called Compare Documents. To invoke it, open the original document, choose Tools, Compare and Merge Documents. Follow along as Word has you open the modified document. The feature automatically generates revision marks, noting the pieces that have been added or deleted from the original document, along with formatting changes. You can then use the normal accept or reject changes routines on the Reviewing Toolbar described earlier to decide which changes you want to accept into your original document.
Adding Comments to Documents
When making changes to a document, it's helpful to leave comments along the way, explaining the reasons behind the changes or suggesting additional changes to the author. Comments should be considered an adjunct to making revisions, as a means to help explain what has been done, or could be done, to a document. If your editors or reviewers make revisions to a document (with revision tracking turned on; see the preceding section), it's relatively easy to accept or reject their revisions. But if the reviewers add comments, rolling the comments into the document is a multistep task that takes a fair amount of time.
To enter a comment, highlight the text that pertains to the comment and choose Insert, Comment. Type your comment in the comment box.
Or you can cycle through all the comments in a document by using the Next button on the Reviewing Toolbar.
You can print all the comments attached to a document by choosing File, Print, and selecting Document showing markup in the Print What drop-down box.
Saving Document Versions
Keeping backup copies and early versions of important documents should be a regular part of your daily Office routine. In addition to the normal backup cycle, Word 2002 enables you to keep multiple versions of a document in a single file.
If you're sharing documents and need to keep track of who made changes to what, you should consider saving versions of the document from time to time. Word makes version saving automatic, if you choose File, Save As, and then choose Tools, Save Version. The Save Version dialog box (which is also accessible by choosing File, Versions) lets you make comments about each specific version. Three caveats with Save versions:
All the versions are stored in a single file. Although only the "deltas"—changes—between versions are saved (it's all invisible to you, of course), file size can become a significant problem, quickly.
The Save Version dialog box lets you delete versions as they become obsolete. Use it.
Never, ever send a versioned file to a customer, or someone else who might take offense at (or advantage of!) full knowledge of intermediate drafts. It happens more often than you might think.