How to clean up ‘tracked changes’ in Word without going insane

If you’ve ever had to coordinate the writing of a document with multiple authors, you’ll probably understand the pain of handling everyone’s comments and edits. Once that’s finally done, it’s often useful to highlight all changes made to the original document. This is common practice in academic writing, for example, when re-submitting a revised manuscript after a round of review.

However, most journals don’t accept documents with Microsoft Word’s ‘tracked changes’. I mean… who wants to read through a jungle of strikethroughs, comment bubbles and rainbow-colored text? They want a nice, clean document without the mess. To show changes from the original document, highlighted text or a different font color would be acceptable at most.

So, I did some searching online, and found some macros to do just that. I really wish I’d discovered this earlier, rather than manually formatting those texts…

The following macro accepts and highlights all changes in yellow. Other highlight colors can be found here, in replacement of WdYellow.

 Sub tracked_to_highlighted()           
        tempState = ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions
        ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = False    
        For Each Change In ActiveDocument.Revisions        
            Set myRange = Change.Range
            myRange.Revisions.AcceptAll
            myRange.HighlightColorIndex = WdYellow            
        Next    
        ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = tempState
    End Sub

If you’d rather change the font color, you can use a slightly different version shown below. Different font colors can also be assigned based on the RGB color code (e.g. RGB(0, 0, 255)), under the field ‘myRange.Font.Color’.

    Sub tracked_to_bluefont()           
        tempState = ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions
        ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = False    
        For Each Change In ActiveDocument.Revisions        
            Set myRange = Change.Range
            myRange.Revisions.AcceptAll
            myRange.Font.Color = 12611584         
        Next    
        ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = tempState
    End Sub

References