19. Collaborating with Others

In a business setting, it’s common for colleagues to work together on a document—passing it back and forth until it’s just right. This chapter shows you how to use Word’s collaboration tools to review a document, add comments, track changes, and restrict other users’ ability to make changes to the document.

In my days as a cub reporter, everyone worked with typewriters, pencils, and paper. If there was no paper in your hand, you just wrote on your hand and then transferred the information to a page when you could. Whenever I finished typing the first draft of a story, I’d submit it to a bitterly scornful city editor who had doubtlessly failed in his attempts to become a novelist or playwright. With unfailing callousness, this preening slob would “mark up” my piece, adding snide comments, making picayune changes, and scribbling all over the page with contemptuously illegible penmanship. After eyeing the copy with all the derision any human could possibly muster in a single effort, he would smugly toss the tattered remains of the pitiful first draft on my desk. (He never placed it in my hand—a stinging reminder of my position at the bottom of the editorial totem pole.) My charge, then, was to rewrite the piece by incorporating all those hand-scrawled comments and changes.