Microsoft Word Tips

Insert comments
If you have students that give you their work in electronic form, you have several helpful options. The Insert menu includes Insert Comment. To use this, highlight the word or phrase that you want to comment on, then select Insert > Comment. You'll have a box at the bottom in which to write your comment, then click Done when you are finished. The text will show a colored highlight where there are comments. The student can move a cursor over the text to read the comment, or right-click (hold the mouse button or Control+click on a Macintosh) to edit or delete the comment. Advantages: your comments can be as long as you like, and this does not destroy the integrity of the student's text with the comments. You can also edit your comments anytime.

Track changes
Here is another option that can be very helpful. Track changes lets you have a visual record of changes made to a document. Start by going to the Tools menu and choosing Track Changes > Highlight changes. Click to put a check mark in the Highlight changes box, which will turn highlighting on. From here until you turn Track changes off, you will see additions in color and underlined, deletions marked in color with strike-throughs, and a mark in the margin showing where changes have occurred. When the same document is edited on different computers, the changes show up in different colors. This makes it easy to see who did what in a document. The next step is to select Accept or reject changes from the Tools > Track changes menu. The user can decide with each change whether to accept or reject it. With each decision, the highlighting disappears.

Track changes can be combined with Insert comments in process writing so that students can show the teacher how they responded to comments. The student could turn Track changes on, make the changes, and print out the marked copy. The student can then go through and clean up the text, print the cleaned up version, and hand in both copies.

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**Caution: If you're using both Track changes and Insert comments you will need to turn Track changes off before you'll be able to delete a comment.