How to Track Changes in Microsoft Word

Track Changes lives on Word’s Review tab: turn on the Track Changes toggle (or press Ctrl+Shift+E), then use the markup dropdown next to it to pick how much editing history shows on screen. Reviewers step through each change with Accept or Reject, or clear the whole document at once, and an author can lock tracking behind a password so nobody can turn it off, hide it, or accept changes without that password.

Turn on Track Changes#

Open the Review tab and click Track Changes in the Tracking group, or press Ctrl+Shift+E — Word documents this exact shortcut in its own screen-reader guidance, and it toggles tracking on or off either way. Click the small arrow under the Track Changes button and choose For Everyone to track every editor’s changes, or Just Mine to track only your own while other reviewers’ edits pass through untracked. Once it’s on, every insertion, deletion, and formatting change picks up a color and the editor’s name, and Word keeps that record until someone accepts or rejects it.

Pick a markup view#

The dropdown next to Track Changes — labeled with whichever view is active, usually All Markup — controls what you see, not what actually gets recorded. Switching views never deletes a tracked change; it only hides how that change displays.

View	What it shows
All Markup	Every insertion, deletion, and formatting change inline, colored by reviewer, with a vertical line in the margin
Simple Markup	A clean read with just a vertical line marking lines that have changes; click the line to expand that change
No Markup	The document as it would look with every change accepted — changes stay recorded, just hidden from view
Original	The document as it looked before any tracked changes, with edits hidden the same way

Accept or reject changes#

Step through changes one at a time with Next and Previous in the Changes group, then use Accept or Reject on whichever change the cursor lands on. Both buttons open a dropdown with more options, as Microsoft’s accept-or-reject guidance lays out.

Command	What it does
Accept/Reject and Move to Next	Applies your decision to the current change, then jumps to the next one
Accept/Reject This Change	Applies your decision without moving the cursor
Accept/Reject All Shown	Applies to every visible change, respecting any reviewer or change-type filter you’ve set
Accept/Reject All	Applies to every change in the document, filtered or not
Accept All and Stop Tracking / Reject All and Stop Tracking	Clears every change and turns Track Changes off in one step

Lock tracking with a password#

Click the arrow under Track Changes and choose Lock Tracking, then enter and confirm a password. While it’s locked, the Track Changes button itself is grayed out — nobody can turn tracking off, and Accept and Reject stop working until you enter the same password to release the lock. Word has no password-recovery option for Lock Tracking, per Microsoft’s Track Changes documentation — lose the password and the document stays permanently in tracked mode. Treat it like any other credential: store it the way you’d store a strong password, not inside the document itself.

If you’re sending a document out for review, turn on tracking and switch to Simple Markup before you share it — reviewers see a clean page but nothing is lost, and you can flip back to All Markup any time to see who changed what. If the file started life as a PDF, convert it to Word first, since tracked changes only work inside a .docx, not in a PDF’s own comment layer. Locking a document against untracked edits this way is the same instinct behind locking specific cells in an Excel sheet you don’t want a collaborator to touch.