MacMost Now 508: Tracking Changes in Pages

You can use the Track Changes feature of Pages in iWork 09 to edit documents. Suggestions are recorded and can be accepted or rejected later. Multiple writers and editors can work on a document and all changes will be recorded along with the editor and time. Comments can also be added.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today's episode, lets look at the track changes feature of iWork pages. So here i am in pages of nine. Now turn on change tracking. You go to Edit-->Track Changes, and this adds an extra bar here at the top of the document. Now, lets say i want to make some changes here. I select a word and i am going to start typing the replacement for it. You can see what its done is that it struck out the word i had selected and replaced it with this word. As i roll over it, i get some information about when the replacement happened. I can see some more information on the left side bar if i click on this button here, it will expand the left side and it will draw an arrow little line here to the change and tell me a little bit about it. One of these appears whenever i make a change, so for instance, if i were to make a formatting change here you can see that it also adds it here and it says that it's formatted bold to the area of change. Now i can change what i see here using the view markup pulldown here. It's set to view all the markup but i can actually have it viewed without the deletions. So you can see the word ideas went away. There's a tiny little triangle there showing that there was something that was deleted and i still see the new word there. I can also view final, so basically it shows me the document as if i have accepted all the changes. If i ever want to make some changes like not having show up in tracking, i can always pause tracking here and make the change and it wont be recorded there and i can turn tracking back on and everything else at this point on will be tracked. Now notice everything i do here is blue. There is the blue changes here, the blue comments to the left. I can change that by going to this menu here, changing the Author color to something else and you can see it changes all of the things that i'm tracking, the things that i made to this color. Now it knows if i made a change and if somebody else gets his document in they can change it using their color and also use their name. You can find that under Preferences under Change Tracking. It's got my name right here and would be a different name for somebody else using another copy of pages. You can also add comments when you are doing changes if you select something here. Click on the comment button here at the top and you can type whatever you want here on the left, to leave a comment for somebody to review later. Now say, several people have gone through a document and made some suggestions. You can go through this document now and accept or reject changes. One way to do it is using this little check mark or 'X' right here. You check something off and it accepts that change and the tracking is now gone for that. Lot of other ways to do it as well, for instance, i can use this menu over here and accept all the changes if thats what i want to do or reject all the changes. So you can kind of go through and reject some and then accept the rest or accept some and reject the rest. You also have these handy up and down arrows over here. You can flip through the different changes as for our usual very long document with just a few changes suggested throughout. And you can also change what shows here on the left, these tracking bubbles. You can have it Show All, Show only for the Selection you are over. So, for instance, i select that, i select like this, it will show me what the text is there. I can also have it show or not show the formatting ones and since that was a formatting change, it will hide it now. So, there's a look at tracking changes in pages. It's very useful if you are writing a document and want somebody else to edit it but then you want to review their suggestions. You can also use it for multiple writers and multiple editors tracking suggestions and accepting and rejecting things throughout a longer editing process. Till next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
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Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 508: Tracking Changes in Pages”

Gary D. Stone

14 years ago

Dear Gary,
That was an excellent video. I am astounded by how many things Pages can do. Right now, I have a printed copy of the user's manual and plan on sitting down at my desk or table and working my way through the manual. I have been busy at work the first month of the year but now have a little more free time to accomplish my task.

Regards,

Gary
Bay Village, Ohio

David

Hi Gary,

I was wondering how this works if you're interacting with Microsoft Word? For example if I write a document in Pages, and send it to someone who opens it in Word and makes changes, and they send it back to me, will the tracking changes work the same way? I'll still be able to view and manipulate the changes as you showed in the video?

~David

Gary Rosenzweig

I just tried it and yes. I exported a Pages document with some tracked changes. Then opened in Word 11. The tracking was in place. Then I added more changes and saved. Opened in Pages again. The original changes and new changes were there with comments.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 508: Tracking Changes in Pages

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 508: Tracking Changes in Pages”

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