Accepting All Changes And Turning Off Tracking in Dissertation Writing: Microsoft Word Tips 

Dissertation writing is a meticulous process. As such, when working on your dissertation, several changes and tracking changes will be a common scenario. You’ll also note that your supervisors will ask you not to delete the suggestions for improvement offered through comments.

Instead, you are required to maintain comments and generate tracked change copies to account for the modifications done and to show that the supervisor’s comments or committee members were addressed. Here, you can certainly choose to accept or reject changes and turn off changes tracking once you are ready to submit your final copy. Take a look at the demonstration below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16jTsPrnlby00v8r71Sc4acA1MWW8pvif/view?usp=sharing

Several platforms are available to enable you to create a word document, but in this context, we’ll address Microsoft Word, which happens to be one of the most popular word processing software. Most of our dissertation clients have expressed concerns about the challenges they face regarding how to “accept all changes” and “stop tracking” when handling their documents.

In a brief, Track Changes is one of the tools that makes editing easier. The tool is especially important when handling lengthy documents like in the case of a dissertation. The tool allows you to follow and view all the changes made in your document. The changes include additions, deletions, and comments. Also, the Track Changes tool is crucial to follow your own edits and those done by others

Often, the changes made by our dissertation consultants and the review panel appear in different font colors from the typical black used in most documents. Once you’re done editing your dissertation and want to submit the final copy, you will need to have a “clean copy” of your document. Accordingly, you’ll need to remove all the tracked changes.  

It is important to note that the Track Changes features are available on both the Mac and PC versions of MS Word. The menus displayed here may look slightly different depending on the version you’re currently using.

Part 1 A: Accepting or Declining Changes on a PC/Windows

1. Go to the “Review” tab
2. Then, find the “Changes” area where you will be prompted to accept or reject changes.
3. You can use the “Next” and “Previous” buttons to go through the changes one by one.
4. (That is particularly important to ensure that the edits made when working on your dissertation were not in vain!)
5. You can proceed to accept or reject changes using the “Accept” and “Reject” buttons. Then, you’ll automatically be moved to the next change.

(The accepted or rejected changes will disappear from the changes list, i.e., they will no longer appear as a change.)

Our academic consults are always keen to help clients complete their dissertations in the shortest time possible. Therefore, they suggest instead of using the “Accept” and “Reject” buttons in the Changes pane to check for individual changes; you can explore further options and use the “Accept all“ or “Reject all” to make changes in a single process.

Part 1 B: Stopping Track Changes

If you want to turn off Word’s Track Changes function, then proceed as follows:

1. Click on the “Review” tab.
2. Click on the “Track Changes” entry in the ribbon display (located in the “Tracking” section).
3. Select the “Track changes” button again.

The action turns off the tracking of changes. Therefore, no more changes will be indicated.

However, the previous changes will still be visible, hence the need to initiate the “Reject” or “Accept” changes option discussed in part A.

Part 2 A: How to Accept or Reject Tracked Changes in macOS Microsoft Word

If you are using a mac, follow the steps below:

1. Go to the Review tab
2. Select the bottom half of the Accept or Reject option
3. In the drop-down menu that appears, you select “Accept” or “Reject” and Move to Next.
4. To make the process faster, you can opt to accept all changes and revisions by using the Accept button and then proceed to select Accept All Changes.
5. To reject all changes at the same time, select Reject and then click Reject All Changes.
6. If your goal is accepting or rejecting all changes and stop tracking, you achieve that by selecting Accept/Reject All Changes and Stop Tracking in the drop-down menu.

Also, you can utilize the Previous and Next buttons under the Review tab to navigate through your dissertation and move from one change to another. An additional option is using the accept or reject format changes that appear in the margins of the edited document as illustrated below.

Option 2 entails using the accept or reject format changes in line within the document as illustrated in the image below.

There you go. You can now navigate through your document without much trouble. However, if after reading through the process still seems complicated, especially when handling a lengthy document like your dissertation, our dissertation consultants will be here to help you with all your needs. You can call or email us, and one of our many consultants at TheGear Consulting will be available to offer assistance.