If your work is like most people's, you probably spend a lot of time working with your team to create documents, projects, proposals, and reports that are sent to a wide variety of recipients for review, revision, or approval.

With the Send to/Send for Review tools in Office, that part of your job is easier. Now when you send e-mail with attachments for review, your reviewers receive documents automatically prepared for collaboration.

The new reviewing tools in Office not only help you collaborate by making it easy for you to send your work to reviewers, but they also help you keep track of your document's progress, and allow you to integrate comments into one cohesive document.

For example, imagine that you work for a small, six-person consulting firm that relies on contracts and proposals to find and manage work. Your team has been meeting for several weeks to discuss your latest proposal. You've collected everyone's input for the proposal, and you have been tasked with putting together a draft. You've created proposals like this before, so you sit down at your computer and open the last successful contract that your firm developed.

Preparing the document in a team-based situation

Using what you've got   You begin by reviewing the old information from the last contract, deciding which parts you need to eliminate and update, and which you need to keep. You decide that any details about old projects need to go, but you'll keep the generic introduction and the parts that relate to your firm. (To save time, your firm could also store a sample contract as a template.)

Inserting questions or comments about old material   As you work, you find that you have a few questions about the information that will be retained (for example, you've decided to increase your billing rates, and you've changed your domain name, but your firm is still debating whether it's best to maintain the old one for brand identity with this client). To draw your team members' attention to these issues, you decide that you need to insert these questions as comments.

Insert questions or comments

1. Select the text or item you want to comment on.

2. On the Reviewing toolbar, click New Comment.
3. Type the comment text in the comment balloon.

Note  If the Reviewing toolbar is not visible, click Comment on the Insert menu to insert your first comment.

You can also type your comments into the Reviewing pane at the bottom of the screen.

Working with new information from e-mail   You've kept up with a lot of your team's research on this client's special needs through e-mail, and one of your team members has pulled together a special profile of your client's existing situation in an old message you've kept in your e-mail archive. You know that with a little bit of editing, you can use this message almost verbatim. Since Microsoft Word is your e-mail editor for Microsoft Outlook®, you can very easily cut and paste from one document into another, and with the new Paste Special features in Word, it's easy to maintain the unique formatting and style of the proposal document you're trying to prepare.

Cut and paste to preserve styles

You can use the Office clipboard to cut and paste information from e-mail messages into documents with unique formatting.

1. Select and copy the text you want to work with from your e-mail message.

2. In the Word document you want to paste into, click Office Clipboard on the Edit menu. This will open the Clipboard task pane.

3. In the document, place your pointer where you want the pasted text to appear. Then, in the Clipboard task pane, click the item you want to paste. This will paste the text into your document.
4. For formatting options, click the Paste Options button (the clipboard icon), which appears just below the pasted text. Click Match Destination Formatting to have the pasted text match the font and style of the document you're working in.

Working with new information from PowerPoint or Excel   Your team has kept detailed spreadsheets of your client's past financial performance, and you'd like to contrast that to the potential improved returns your service would offer. You also found some good summaries of the client's problem in a preliminary presentation a team member put together, and you'd like to use that information, too. You can cut and paste information from Microsoft PowerPoint® or Microsoft Excel into Word.

Working with new information from handwritten notes   To keep track of discussions and meetings, your firm uses Tablet PCs to work with the handwriting recognition features in Word. You can cut and paste this information into your new report as you normally would.

Tracking changes while you edit   While you are working with information from various sources, you can keep track of the format- or content-based changes you make by tracking changes while you edit.

Track changes while you edit

1. On the Reviewing toolbar, click Track Changes.

2. Make the changes you want by inserting, deleting, and moving text or graphics, or changing the formatting.

You can turn off the change tracking by clicking Track Changes on the Reviewing toolbar again.

Sending the document for review

You've made the preliminary changes, and your draft of the proposal is ready for review by your team members. You're ready to save it on your own machine and prepare an e-mail message to your team, asking them to review the proposal.

Send a document for review

On the File menu, point to Send To, and then click Mail Recipient (for Review)....

This will automatically generate an e-mail message in Word, with your document attached. The subject line will say, "Please review [document name]." The body of the e-mail message automatically reads, "Please review the attached document." You can edit this message, or you can simply send the e-mail in this form by entering your team-mates' e-mail addresses in the "To" line and clicking the Send button.

You can also select the order in which you'd like your team members to review the document by using the Routing features of Send for Review.

When your team members receive your e-mail, they will find the proposal attached, and the reviewing tools will be displayed automatically when the proposal is opened. Reviewers can then add comments and suggest revisions to the text. After each member of your team has reviewed the proposal and has replied to your mail, you will be able to pull everyone's comments together into one document by comparing and merging the changes and suggestions.