Why Track Changes Is More Than a Record-Keeping Tool
Most Malaysian postgraduate students have used the Track Changes function in Microsoft Word at some point — usually because their supervisor turned it on when returning a chapter with comments. But using track changes for thesis editing goes well beyond accepting or rejecting supervisor feedback. When used deliberately as part of your own self-editing and proofreading process, Track Changes becomes a powerful tool for managing multiple revision passes, maintaining a clear record of what has changed, and ensuring that late-stage edits do not introduce new errors into previously clean sections.
Understanding how to use Track Changes effectively — not just how to turn it on — helps you manage the complex, multi-stage editing process of a postgraduate thesis in a way that keeps the revision history visible, reversible, and auditable. This is particularly valuable in the final weeks before submission when multiple rounds of changes are happening quickly and the risk of accidentally losing or corrupting earlier work is highest.
Using Track Changes for Your Own Revision Passes
Many students think of Track Changes as something supervisors do to their work, not something they do to their own work. But activating Track Changes during your own proofreading and revision passes has several practical benefits. Every change you make — every word added, deleted, or moved — is recorded and visually marked in the document. This means you can see at a glance which sections have been heavily revised in the current pass and which have not yet been touched.
It also means that if you make a revision that turns out to be worse than the original — which happens frequently in the final stages of thesis editing when fatigue affects judgment — you can reject that specific tracked change and return to the original wording without having to reconstruct it from memory. Without Track Changes active, a late-stage revision that overwrites previously good writing is permanent unless you have saved a separate backup version, which few students do consistently enough to rely on.
To activate Track Changes in Microsoft Word, go to the Review tab and click Track Changes, then select Track Changes from the dropdown. All subsequent edits will be marked. When you are satisfied with a proofreading pass, you can accept all changes in a section, or accept changes selectively before printing the final version.
Managing Supervisor Comments and Your Responses
When a supervisor returns a chapter with tracked changes and comments, the process of addressing those changes is itself a proofreading task. Work through supervisor comments systematically rather than randomly — addressing all comments in one section before moving to the next, rather than jumping between chapters or addressing the easiest comments first. Using track changes for thesis editing in this context means keeping the supervisor’s markup visible while you add your own revisions, so both sets of changes are legible and distinguishable.
Once you have addressed a supervisor comment, right-click on the comment bubble and select Mark Comment as Resolved, or delete the comment if your supervisor prefers a clean document. Do not simply click somewhere else and leave unresolved comments buried in the document — unresolved comments that reach the final submission are a problem both aesthetically and potentially in terms of the document’s anonymity if your thesis is shared for blind review.
Comparing Document Versions Using Track Changes
One of the most useful but underused features related to Track Changes is the Compare Documents function. If you have saved multiple versions of a chapter at different points during the writing process — which is good practice — Word can compare any two versions and show you all the differences between them as tracked changes. This is invaluable if you are unsure whether a recent revision retained all the important content from an earlier version, or if you want to review everything that changed between the version your supervisor last saw and your current draft.
To use this feature in Microsoft Word, go to Review > Compare > Compare, then select the original document and the revised document. Word generates a new document showing all differences marked as tracked changes, with the original text preserved and the revised text shown as additions. Reviewing this comparison document gives you a complete picture of every change between the two versions, which is far more reliable than trying to remember what you changed during editing sessions that may have happened days or weeks apart.
Cleaning Up Track Changes Before Final Submission
Before you generate the final PDF of your thesis for submission, it is essential to accept all tracked changes and delete all comments so the submitted document is clean. A thesis submitted with tracked changes still visible — showing deletions in red strikethrough and additions in coloured text — is not professionally presented and may not be accepted by your faculty’s submission system. It also reveals your editing process to the examiner in a way that was not intended.
To accept all changes at once in Word, go to Review > Accept > Accept All Changes. To delete all comments, go to Review > Delete > Delete All Comments in Document. After doing this, check the document visually to confirm that no tracked changes or comments remain — occasionally the Accept All function misses changes in textboxes, footnotes, or headers that are not part of the main body flow. Saving the clean version as a new file before converting to PDF preserves your tracked change history in the working file while ensuring the submitted version is professional and complete. Using track changes for thesis editing throughout the revision process, and cleaning it up properly before submission, reflects the same careful, systematic approach that should characterise every aspect of your thesis preparation.
