If you’ve never used Word’s more advanced functions, you might be missing something really useful, and just not know it. For example: a lot of business interactions would benefit from the Review tab. It allows for tracking changes outside of metadata, which is often ugly and can be difficult for an average user to find. While the metadata can be useful in some cases as an absolute record of every action taken on a document (perhaps most useful in legal proceedings or for fact-finding in academic cheating accusations), it’s not so good for things like measuring project involvement or making sure proofreading has actually taken place, a far more likely use for those in school or business. The review tab also allows multiple users to make suggestions and leave comments on the work without actually altering it or requiring anyone to do annoying things like changing the font or color of the text to indicate a desired change in the content. Instead, by using the review tab, one can enable the final editor to allow or disregard changes because every change is a suggestion.
Editor
The editor function at the top of the tab is mostly what you’d expect – it’ll show you where spelling and grammar issues are, as well as it’s best guess at conciseness, clarity, et cetera below that. Word will keep track of these things as you type as well! And, crucially, if you don’t want Word breathing down your neck about the most optimal way to phrase things betterer, you can find options to turn off a lot of those under the File Tab’s “Options”. Once you have the “Options” menu open, go to proofing, and you can turn off everything including the spellchecker, or turn on everything including “Refinement”. Note that a handful of these tools are powered by generative AI or otherwise have Copilot’s input, and that sometimes context will alter the way you choose to phrase things; you can choose to ignore the input on an individual ‘flaw’ or turn them off altogether by clicking on the underlined words.
Next to the Editor functions are these choices again, but also a thesaurus, and a wordcount button. If you want the wordcount to be visible, but don’t want to open that menu every single time, you can also add the wordcount to the bottom of the page. In the open document in Word, you should be able to see a white bar above your task bar, where you should already have the page count and the option to increase or decrease the zoom on the page by default. By left clicking, you can open a menu with other options for that bottom bar! Wordcount is among them.
The next thing to go over are accessibility options. You can, once again, access these features elsewhere: your “read aloud” option is generally available with left click as well, and the “Check Accessibility” widget is largely meant for use for screenreaders and pictures. Word has a built-in language feature, but once again, if this is for professional use, you should consult an expert and consider the context of the work you’re doing, as a machine won’t understand context and may translate words incorrectly across languages.
Comments and Markup
Onto the exciting parts of the Review panel! Comments are one of the tools I find myself using a lot when writing for fun. To insert a comment, highlight the text you want that comment attached to and either select the “New Comment” notice that pops up on the highlighted text menu, or pick “New Comment” from the comments widget in the review ribbon. If you don’t highlight a word to do this, it will automatically insert the comment in the last spot you were typing, and will highlight the last word, too, so if your comment is meant to be more general, make note of that within the comment itself.
You’ll notice other options here too, including options to delete comments, jump to previous comments or to the next one, and an option to show comments, all of which are pretty self-explanatory.
The Markup tools have the tech that I mentioned at the beginning of this article, with a variety of tools designed to make giving and receiving feedback as painless as possible. The first icon is to ‘Filter All Markup’ with a dropdown menu beside it, and this will allow you to sort information. On a team that knows how to use these tools effectively, you can also find any changes designated specifically to be done by you, and whether or not you have any active ones still open. The column next to it, which has three items listing out what markup you’d like to see across the document, as well as how you’d like them displayed, and if you’d like a separate reviewing pane or not, are all very useful tools for writing copy.
Tracking is the next widget, and it’s very similar: on a document with many people editing it (note: the actual document, not multiple copies of the same document – this works on a single file, you’ll need another tool to compare copies), you can monitor which changes were made by who. If you have a base document, you can also see which changes were made, which is great for some legal applications. This tool also lets you track recommended changes (which will be visible as underlined, red text, and removed text will have a strikethrough marking it as recommended to be changed) and either accept or deny them as you wish. If you accept a change, the text will remove the struck-through parts, and leave behind the new stuff; if you reject it, the new stuff disappears, and the struck-through items become normal font and color again.
If you’re interested, you can also compare the file against its earlier forms with the ‘Compare’ widget, which does exactly what it sounds like. It will show changes made between the last time edits were made and now; you can arbitrarily pick how far back you’d like to compare to, and track changes like that. You can also compare copies of a document in this tab, and combine them, with fine control over which changes stay and which go. This is a process I wouldn’t recommend shunting off to an AI quite yet, even if it’s a little tedious, even if CoPilot offers the service; because the odds are that the other people working on the document won’t be happy if something goes even slightly awry in CoPilot’s rewriting of your collective work, something CoPilot cannot quite guarantee won’t happen. A human touch will at least notify you when changes were rejected or accepted erroneously!
Finally, the Protect widget will allow you to restrict editing, or specific authors from editing. This is, once again, a tool that’s useful in a niche – but if your business cannot use Google Docs, or you’re trying to keep a document saved on a local network as well as The Cloud, this is a great tool. It also assumes a default of ‘everyone is allowed to edit’ as opposed to the Google Docs default of ‘nobody but the original document creator is allowed to edit’. Neither is worse, but some may find one more appealing than the other.
In short, the Review panel provides many tools you may find useful, so you need to know they exist! Many applications would benefit from having a built-in accessibility reader, a thesaurus, and an editing/tracking tool that can also merge documents for you and compare them!
