Protecting Tracked Changes

Vikas has a document on which many people in his office work. The original author of the document turns on Track Changes, and then sends the document to others. Unfortunately, it is possible for other people to turn off Track Changes or to accept/reject changes done by others who previously worked on the document. Vikas wonders if there is a way that Track Changes can be locked so that only the original author can turn it off and a way that only the original author can accept/reject changes.

Theoretically, there is a way. What you need to do is to protect the document so that only tracked changes can be made by other editors. Here's how to do it:

1. Display the Review tab of the ribbon.
2. Click the the Restrict Editing tool in the Protect group near the right side of the ribbon. (In Word 2007 and Word 2010 the tool is called Protect Document.) Word displays the Restrict Editing (or Protect Document) pane at the right side of your document.
3. In the Editing Restrictions section of the pane, choose the Allow Only This Type of Editing In the Document checkbox. Word enables the drop-down list under the checkbox.
4. Using the drop-down list, choose Tracked Changes.
5. Click Yes, Start Enforcing Protection. Word displays the Start Enforcing Protection dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Start Enforcing Protection dialog box.

6. Enter a password (twice) in the dialog box.
7. Click on OK.
8. Save the file as normal.

With this protection in place, people can view and edit your document with the changes being shown as regular Track Changes edits. Further, nobody can accept or reject changes without knowing the original password used to protect the document.

There is, of course, a big caveat to all of this, and it bears repeating any time people start to talk about protection. In Word, document protection will only provide protection for those who decide to "play nice." There are ways around the protection—the most notable of which is that an editor can simply copy all of the text from the edited document into a new document and start passing around that new document as if it were the original document. There is, unfortunately, no way around such behavior with Word documents.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11674) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Protecting Tracked Changes.