Using Commenting And Tracking In Mac Pages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Comments and Change Tracking in Pages.

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Now imagine writing something but without a computer. You would write on a piece of paper and then when you were done maybe you wanted somebody to help you with that document. You would hand it to them and they would take a pen, maybe in a different color. They would circle words they had questions about. They would insert words in places and they would cross out things they thought should be deleted. They may even add comments in the margins. Well you can do the same thing while working in Pages using Change Tracking and Comments.

So here I have a sample document. Let's say it's time to go through and edit it. Now this can be you editing your own document or you could have handed this document off to somebody else. You could do that by either just giving them the file or you could Share it in iCloud using the collaborating feature here. Either way they can make changes. Now what if they were to see a word and wanted to delete it. They might delete it there but then how would you know that word was deleted. You could carefully look and compare it to your old document but that would be difficult and easy to miss something that was deleted. The same thing if they changed a word. So instead of having them just make edits directly to the document they could use what is called Change Tracking. 

To turn it on go to Edit and then Track Changes. Now you'll see an extra toolbar here at the top. Now when they make a change, like say deleting a word, it looks like this. The word is crossed out and there's a mark made here on the left. Let's say they insert a new word. The word is inserted but it's a different color. You can see if you move the pointer over it it shows you the name of the person that made the change and exactly what happened. Let's say they wanted to replace a word. You could see the words were crossed out and the new word is in its place. Now how about if they just wanted to make a note. They could do that in a couple of ways. One is they could select some text and they could use the button up here to Add a Comment. There are two buttons. Comment and Highlight. When you use Comment it will allow them to type a comment here and then click Done. Highlight works in a similar way but you don't need to add a comment. 

Now when working in this there are controls here at the top. So you could see the Comment and Highlight button. There are also keyboard shortcuts for that under Insert. There's Highlight and Comment right here. Shift Command H and Shift Command K. You can also use the switch here to pause tracking. Then any changes that are made are permanent and you wouldn't actually see that the change has happened. You could also use this control right here to change what you see. So right now it is showing full markup. Everything is there. But you could also show Markup without Deletions. So anything that's deleted is gone. You just see this tiny little mark right here that something was there before. You could also go to Final and see exactly what the document looks like with all the additions, deletions, and changes applied. So you could read the text over in its final state. 

Another thing that can be changed here is the author color. So you could change which color the current author is using. Also the name could be changed by going into Preferences and then under General you'll see Author. That's where it gets the name from. 

Now you could also use these arrows here to go through each item. So you could move through everything that there's that's either a comment, highlight, or change. But what you probably want to do when using all of this is to bring up the Sidebar here.  You can click here and it will bring up the Sidebar. Now you can see each thing in a list. Under View Options you could change the order in which things are shown here. You can even Filter showing only one user. So if you have three people that have edited the document before it gets back to you, you could just focus on one of them. You could also Hide Comments or Hide Changes just to focus on one or the other. If you move your pointer over anyone of these it's going to draw a line to exactly where each one is.  You can see the text of the Comment here. For Highlights, Highlights are like Comments but without any comment, so you could change it to a comment by simply adding one here. You can see anything that has a Comment actually has its little box here. If the Sidebar isn't visible you could actually move your pointer and click the box to bring up the comment, or you can just move your pointer over the actual item. 

Another thing you can do is you could also Reply to a comment. So you see this comment here. I could click Reply and reply to myself in this case. But if you have multiple editors and you're going back and forth then you could have a little conversation about an item in the document. 

Now let's say you've given your Pages document to somebody else or you've collaborated and they make changes and now it's time for you to go back and look at their suggestions. So you go back in and you look at all of this and now you could do several things with every single change. If you have the Sidebar open it's easy. You see Accept or Reject. By Accept you could see how it deletes that and makes the change permanent. The same thing with any words that are inserted. If you don't have the Sidebar you can always move your pointer over it and then use Accept or Reject here. Notice when you select one you have Accept and Reject buttons here in the Toolbar and if you go to Edit you'll see that you've got them in the Menu complete with keyboard shortcuts for each. So you can basically fly through these accepting and rejecting changes. Of course you can make your own changes here at the same time. You could also just Reject something and then make your own change, perhaps pausing things like that, making the change so it doesn't add a new item here, and then turning it back on to go back and continue accepting and rejecting the suggestions. You also have the ability right here to Accept All Changes or Reject All Changes. So some people like to do going through and only rejecting things. If it's something they want to accept they just leave it alone. Then after they have rejected everything that they don't want, maybe make their own changes as well, they might want to go here, just view it as final, make sure it's what they want. If everything looks good then they could go and Accept All Changes and complete everything. 

Note if you want to turn off tracking, either using this or going to Edit, Turn Off Tracking, it's going to prompt you whether to accept all changes or reject all changes. When you turn off tracking it is going to get rid of all that information so it needs to know which one of those two things to do. Note that when changes are rejected, like that, that comments still remain because comments aren't actually changing anything in the document. They are just links to little comments or highlights and you could still keep them there and refer to them later. If you do something like printout the document or create a PDF they are not going to be included. 

Another thing about Comments and Highlights is that even with tracking off you can still add them. So, for instance, I can select some text here. You can see Comment is one of the default buttons in the Toolbar. You can also go to Insert, Comment, or Highlight. They are both there even if you have Changed Tracking off. 

Now all of this also works on the iPad and iPhone in Pages. So if somebody doesn't have a Mac but they have one of those devices they could certainly do that. Change Tracking isn't part of iCloud.com. The web apps where somebody who doesn't have any Apple products at all could actually review your document. But Comments are. So if somebody looking at a document using a link and then going to the web version of Pages could actually add comments that then you would see when you look at the document again. Some of you may know that this is similar to how Microsoft Word tracks changes. In fact if you export from Pages to a Word document and give somebody else that Word document they can actually work with those changes, do the Change Tracking in Word, and when you get it back and open the Word Document in Pages you'll see those changes. Of course there are a lot of features that Word has that Pages doesn't and vice versa so you want to make sure you're just at the stage where you have simple text in the document and it's not too complex. But you can actually get feedback from somebody else if all they have available is Word on Windows.

As with most tools the best way to learn this is to try is out before you actually need it. So take an old document and duplicate it or just create a sample document, try this, add a bunch of changes, add a bunch of comments and see what it is like to accept and reject them and go through it. Then you'll gain a better understanding of how you can use this to work better in the future. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.