Every writer jealously guards his text. It's enough that someone must edit, some lowly editor who seethes with jealously over the fact that the noble writer is the one who gets all the fame and glory even though it's the editor who deserves the credit. Oh, editors can be nasty. [Hey! — Ed.] But other writers can be worse.
Revision marks are a way of tracking changes made to your document by evil people. Okay, maybe not evil, but people who change things without first making suggestions. To help protect yourself against such intrusion, you can use one of Word's many revision-tracking tools. And you can view the changes — accepting and rejecting — them as you go.
This job is done by the Accept or Reject Changes dialog box, which lets you quickly browse through a document with revision marks to yeah-or-nay each little correction. Here's how:
1. Move the toothpick cursor to the tippy top of your document. (Press Ctrl+Home.)
2. Choose Tools-->Track Changes-->Accept or Reject Changes.
The Accept or Reject Changes dialog box appears (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Accept or Reject Changes dialog box.
3. Click the Find button.
Word ventures out into your document to find the next revision mark, which notes something that has been changed or added to your original document. Word stops at each deletion or addition, highlighting it for you on the screen.
4. Click the Accept or Reject button.
Now pay attention:
If you click Accept on a strikethrough word or phrase, you're telling Word to remove that phrase, to accept the edit or change from your original document.
If you click Reject on a strikethrough word or phrase, you're telling Word to keep that phrase in your document.
If you click Accept on an underlined word or phrase, you're telling Word to keep that addition to your original document.
If you click Reject on an underlined word or phrase, you're telling Word to remove that addition from your document.
It works if you don't think of strikethrough and underline text together. Just look at each change and think, "Accept or reject?" for each of them.
5. Repeat Step 4 as necessary.
Or you can ignore the change and click the Find button to find the next instance.
6. Click the Close button when you're done.
The Revisions dialog box revises itself outta there.
Here are a few things to remember about accepting and rejecting changes:
- If you goof, you can click the Undo button in the Accept or Reject Changes dialog box.
- You can click the Reject All button to do away with all the revisions or corrections. I mean, to hell with 'em!
- Click the Accept All button to keep all the changes at once. After all, your editor is smarter than you are, and you should just blindly succumb to her superior knowledge.
- Going through this process removes all the revision marks from your document.
- Don't forget to save your revised text back to disk.
| 
