When team or class members return a document you sent to them for review, you can accept, delete, or modify their comments. How you do so will depend on the way you set up the original draft for review. You can route the document as an e-mail attachment to each team member for his or her review in a specific sequence. In that case, each member comments on the draft before forwarding it to the next member specified in your e-mail transmittal. Alternatively, you can send the document to all team members at the same time as an e-mail attachment. After finishing their comments, they can return their individual drafts to you by the due date requested.

The following guidelines for reviewing collaborative documents are based on Microsoft Word for Windows 2002, but similar text-production software packages, such as WordPerfect, Acrobat, Word for Macintosh, and other versions of Word provide similar options. Review the Help menu of these packages for instructions on how to set up, route, annotate, review, and merge collaborative documents.

Here we discuss two ways to manage reviewers’ comments and changes:

If you routed the original document to team members, requesting their comments in a prescribed sequence, you will receive a single draft containing everyone’s comments following their reviews. To view their comments, complete the following steps:

1. Open the document and click on "View" at the top of the screen. From the resulting drop-down menu, choose "Print Layout View."
2. Right-click in the toolbar area at the top of the screen and click "Reviewing" in the drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 1.

 

 

Figure 1. How to Access the Reviewing Toolbar

3. On the Reviewing Toolbar near the top of the screen, click "Show" to select the items you want displayed. Then select "All Reviewers" from the Reviewers option, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. How to Display Comments from All Reviewers

Text inserted by reviewers is underlined, and comments, questions, and deleted text appear in balloons in the margin that point to the relevant area of the draft. You can identify individual reviewers in several ways as you go through the master document. Each reviewer’s inserts and balloons are uniquely color coded. In addition, putting the cursor over a balloon displays the name of the reviewer and date of the comment. As an additional cue, ask reviewers to type their names or initials in their comment balloons when you circulate the draft.

As you review comments, click on the appropriate icon in the Reviewing toolbar to evaluate and accept, reject, or delete them, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Close-up of Reviewing Toolbar Functions

To review how the document will look with all changes incorporated, select "Final" from the drop-down menu "Final Showing Markup." If you are satisfied with the changes as marked, save the file. (You will probably want to save the file under a new name so that you can retain the draft with comments for your reference.)

When individual team members finish their comments and e-mail separate files back to you, save the files in a separate project folder, and give each a unique filename different from that of the original document. Then complete the following steps:

1. Open the document and click on "View" at the top of the screen. From the resulting drop-down menu, choose "Print Layout View."
2. Right-click in the toolbar area at the top of the screen and click "Reviewing" in the drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 1.
3. From the Tools menu, click "Compare and Merge Documents," select the appropriate draft, and from the Merge menu (lower right), click "Merge into current document," as shown in Figure 4.
   

Figure 4. Drop-down Merge Menu for Incorporating Reviewer Drafts

The two versions are automatically merged when the file opens, thus saving you the effort of combining the changes on each version manually. Review the document with the merged changes using the icons in the Reviewing toolbar (Figure 3), and repeat this process for each team member’s draft. When you are satisfied with the changes as incorporated, save the file under a new name.