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• #TRACK CHANGES IN GOOGLE SHEETS FREE#

And Suggest Edits’ in-text revision boxes are much easier to scan and work with than the old Track Changes add-on, which displayed all revisions that had been made to a doc in one long sidebar you were forced to scroll through. Once you know where to find Suggesting mode on the navigation bar, you’re good to go. Like most Google tools, Suggest Edits is super simple to use. Now all the changes are highlighted individually and you can see them all at a glance. This allowed you to see everything that was different between your current doc and its previous versions, but you had to play compare-and-contrast to guess which specific changes had been made between versions, a tedious and imperfect process. Here’s why: Huge improvement over revision historyīefore Track Changes and Suggest Edits came along, the only way you could tell which changes had been made to a Google Doc was via the less-than-stellar “revision history” setting.

Overall, I’m a huge fan of using this new tool to track changes in Google Docs. If you want to add an explanation or further notes to your changes, you can “reply” to the revision box just like you’d reply to a regular Google Docs comment.įor more information on this feature, check out Google’s help page. Your changes will be highlighted and a revision box (that looks just like a comment box) will pop up next to them showing the date and time you made these changes and what specific changes were made. To suggest an edit, simply select Suggesting mode and make changes in the text of the doc - add words, change fonts, add subheadings, delete paragraphs, etc. The mode you’re currently in will appear next to the pencil icon. Viewing, which allows you to see what the doc will look like in its final state.Suggesting, whereby revisions are visible via tracked changes and.Editing, or straight-up working on the doc, where your changes are not tracked.(It’s underneath the “Comments” and “Share” buttons.)Ĭlick this button and you’ll see a drop-down menu that allows you to switch between several modes: When you’re in a doc, you’ll see a pencil icon button on the upper right-hand corner of the screen. That means you can use it immediately, whether you’re working on a new doc or you’ve created one from scratch. Unlike Google Doc’s old Track Changes, which was somewhat clunky in that it required the installation of an add-on, Suggest Edits is now a built-in feature in Google Docs. “Track Changes” is the name of Microsoft Word’s editing tracker, which many writers used long before transitioning to the more collaborative Docs. While Google’s new editing collaboration tool is called Suggest Edits, many writers still refer to it as Track Changes, and not just because that was the name of Google Doc’s previous editing tool.

If you haven’t taken the ever-evolving Suggest Edits feature for a ride to see how it’s been updated, we’ve taken several trips for you, and here’s what we found. It’s since been a great way for multiple people to access and revise the same document in real-time without the frustration of wondering if you’ve got the “latest” version or if someone’s working off a different draft than you - I’m looking at you, Microsoft Word. Within the last few years, however, the process of tracking changes in Google Docs has immensely improved. Initially, Google Docs dropped a track changes add-on that came with a few quirks and kinks that needed to be ironed out, making the editing process more clunky than desired. Since its emergence in 2014, Google Docs’ Suggest Edits feature has had editors everywhere rejoicing because of its almost-seamless ability to make content collaboration a whole lot easier. (Here at The Write Life, we’re big fans of Google docs!)

#TRACK CHANGES IN GOOGLE SHEETS FREE#

Do you do most of your writing in Google Docs?įrom collaboration to easily checking word count in Google docs to its Suggest Edits feature, many writers rave about this free word processing software.