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Accept All Changes by Just One Reviewer

When collaborating on a Word file, sometimes we want to (or must) accept all of one person’s suggested changes. Maybe they’re the big boss. Maybe they set all the styles in the document. Maybe, they’re the safety reviewer and their changes are essential to make sure no readers blow up; at least not because of this file.

Rather than clicking through each change, figuring out who made it, then clicking either Accept or Next, use this efficient method:

First, hide everyone else’s changes: on the Review ribbon for Mac users, click Markup Options, scroll down to Reviewers, and click All. Windows users click Show Markup on the Review ribbon, then select All Reviewers from Specific People. Finally, return to the Show Markup/Options icon and select the one reviewer whose mark up you want to see.

You may want to scroll through that reviewer’s changes now to be sure any changes that need to be rejected are rejected. But take note of the snafu alert below.

Now click the tiny arrows beside “accept” in both the Comments area and in the Changes area of the Review ribbon and select “accept all … shown”. (Detailed instructions are in another post.)

Finally, go back to the Markup Options and set that to show all Reviewers’ markup again.

Snafu Alert

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Learn more tips for working with Track Changes in Chapters 3, 4, & 5 of the book.

Everyone’s changes are showing when you tell Word to show only one reviewer’s markup, and they’re still tracked. Those changes just are not flagged in the current view anymore. This can result in some horrid messiness, where both deleted and inserted text are shown without any tracking marks. Just remember the purpose of what you’re doing and resist the urge to fix oddness until everyone’s changes are flagged again.


Rejecting changes is just as easy.




Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.



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