This video will give an overview of how tracked changes look in Overleaf and how to accept or reject them. The transcript is below.

This video is to give a short demonstration for clients who may not be familiar with processing tracked changes in Overleaf.

To start with, there is a pane between the editor pane and the PDF pane that shows the editor’s changes and any comments. If the change pane is not showing, click the review button at the top of the Overleaf window.

The track changes control at the top of the review pane lets you turn on or off change tracking for individuals or for everyone. You can open and close this control by clicking at the top of it.

Each change is noted with the text that changed, when it was changed, and who made the change. I’m making this video using a test account so the changes show my name from my main account. Any track changes that you make would show the word “you” here. Any text that your editor adds will show as added in the bubble with the text that was added.

Changes show the before and after text. If the text is long, there will be a “show all” link so you can expand the text and see the whole thing. Finally, deletes show the text that was deleted.

Clicking on a bubble moves the cursor in the text window to that change. Sometimes it’s a little bit hard to find the exact space you need to click.

Clicking on a change in the text window will highlight the bubble by moving it slightly to the left.

Comments also show in the review pane. You can resolve a comment to move it off this view or reply to it. In order to save a reply, you need to click the reply button.

Now let’s look at processing the edits. As you review the edits, you can accept or reject each one. If you reject them, the text goes back to what it was before. Any added text will be taken out. Changed text will go back to the previous version, and deleted text will be put back in.

If you accept the change, the change bubble will go away and the text will be incorporated into the document.

You can accept or reject several changes at once by selecting a section of text, for example, an entire paragraph. There will be buttons that let you reject all the changes in that section or accept all the changes in that section. The number of changes are indicated in parentheses.

You can even select the entire document to accept or reject all changes in the document. Those controls to do that are at the top of the change tracking window. If you don’t see them, you may need to close the change tracking controls as they will obscure the top of that change tracking pane.

So that is it for this video. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. You can contact me at wes@wordsbywes.ink, or reply to the video. Thanks very much and have a great rest of your day.