When you're working on a complicated project that involves a lot of input from a lot of different people, you need a way to keep track of everyone's feedback and to manage the suggestions you receive. With the Send to/Send for Review tools in Office, you can pull together comments and changes from multiple reviewers into one document.

With Office, you can easily compare and merge documents. Feedback from your reviewers, on both text and formatting, is combined into one document, so that you can identify and accept, reject, or change the suggestions that are made.

For example, you are working on a proposal for your consulting firm and you've already collected everyone's ideas and input, created a draft, and then sent it to your team for review. Now you're ready to pull together the feedback you've received.

Comparing and merging documents

When you compare and merge documents in Word, Word uses change tracking to highlight differences in text and formatting. When you merge the documents for review, you can choose to pull the comments into the original document, into the document you are currently working on, or into a new document.

Compare and merge two documents

When your reviewers return a document with feedback as an e-mail attachment, you will be automatically prompted to compare and merge their suggestions when you double-click the attachment. Click Yes to see the changes in one document.

You can also manually incorporate your reviews when you open the edited copy of the document later, by clicking Compare and Merge on the Tools menu. Then select the original document, and click one of the following:

• Merge   displays the results of the comparison in the original document.
• Merge into current document   displays the results of the merge in the document that is currently open.
• Merge into new document   displays the results in a new document.

Compare and merge multiple documents

1. Open the document into which you want to merge changes.
2. On the Tools menu, click Compare and Merge Documents.
3. Open one of the documents with changes you'd like to be merged.
4. Click the arrow next to Compare and click Compare into current document.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until all copies of the document are merged.

Quickly finding the changes

If you want to quickly identify and review the changes made by the people who reviewed your document, you can print a list of the changes. This might be especially useful in creating an agenda of items to discuss at a meeting, or a list of action items.

Print a list of changes

1. Open the document that contains tracked changes.
2. On the File menu, click Print.
3. In the Print what box, click List of changes.

Making decisions based on comparisons

After you've pulled together all the feedback with the Compare and Merge tools, you can begin to review the suggestions that the other members of your team have made.

Using Track Changes on the Tools menu, you can accept or reject the changes that your team members have made. You can also delete or respond to comments.