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If you have someone edit or proofread your paper for a class, they may have used either the “Comment” tool or the “Track Changes” tool in Microsoft Word.  Even after incorporating the comments and the changes, you may still see the comments and the changes in the margin of your paper.  Or, worse, when you upload the document to Blackboard, they show up when your instructor views your paper (as seen in the image below).

Read on to learn how to remove both the tracked changes edits and the comments from your Word documents.

Example of Word Doc with Tracked Changes

How to Remove the Tracked Changes

  1.  Open the Word document.
  2.  In the menu at the top of the Word document, click the Review tab.
    Select Review tab
  3.  Go to the “Changes” section of the Review tab.
    Changes Section
  4. From here you can do one of two things.
    (A) Go through all the comments one by one by clicking either the Accept or Reject button.
    Example of document with comments
    You can navigate through the formatting changes by clicking previous or next.
    Select Previous or Next to move through changes
    or
    (B) Accept all of the changes.  To do this, click the arrow under Accept and then select Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking.
    Click Accept and select Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking

Note: It is important to stop tracking in order to remove all of the changes and prevent any new changes that you many make from being tracked.

You can now upload your document to Blackboard and the tracked changes will not appear (see image below).

Example of a document with no tracked changes or comments

However, if you used the “comment” function, the comments will still appear when you upload to Blackboard (see image below).

Example of comments from blackboard

How to Remove the Comments

  1. Open the Word document.
  2.  In the menu at the top of the Word document, click the Review tab.
    Select Review tab
  3. Go to the “Comment” section of the Review tab.
    Comments section
  4. Click on the arrow under Delete and select Delete All Comments in Document.
    Click Delete and select Delete All Comments

Now, when you upload your document to Blackboard, it will look normal (see image below) and will have neither comments nor tracked changes in the margin.

Example of a document with no tracked changes or comments

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