Tom Gorham
Pages’ track changes feature may not be quite as comprehensive as Word’s, but it’s still pretty impressive – and even applies to layout elements…
As far as it’s possible to have any sort of relationship with a feature in a word processing program, it’s fair to say that Track Changes and I have had a somewhat fractious past.
At first, the feature glistened with obvious attraction, allowing people to comment and improve a draft without removing the original underlying text. However, there was a dark side, too: it carries with it an implicit danger: making public comments that should otherwise be hidden.
I fell foul of this when I first used the feature back in the days when I was a Word user. I would regularly upload Word case study documents to the Internet blissfully unaware that I had left an entire chronology of its passage to publication in its margins.
Bad enough, but I probably got off lightly. I’ve heard of official government documents wholeheartedly promoting one policy in a published release, with tracked changes neatly espousing the opposite view. And I know of one recruitment consultant, who gets sent a steady stream of CVs adorned with tracked changes. Invariably the original, rather bland CV has been brushed up by a professional résumé writer, and then forwarded, without the changes being accepted, to the consultant. While confessing a degree of fascination in spotting how work experience can be inflated, the consultant admits that such obvious selfpromotion only leads to the CV going straight into the bin.
For that reason, I haven’t been in any rush to test Pages’ Change Tracking feature, but when I needed to use it recently to work with a series of tracked document sent by a Word user, I ended up very impressed.
As with all Pages’ features, Change Tracking is superbly implemented. As soon as you turn it on, a tracking bar appears above the active document that lets you control the tracked changes and your view of them. Once tracking begins, any changes you make to the document are annotated in ‘tracking bubbles’ in the document’s left-hand margin, together with the name of the author and the time the comment or amendment was made. The feature almost exactly matches that of Microsoft Word, but is much better looking.
Still, there are some differences in the ways the programs work. Unlike Word, Pages doesn’t warn you if you attempt to save a document with tracked changes, which are always saved with the document. It won’t warn you if you print a document with embedded alterations, either. It’s clear that Pages is on the fundamentalist wing of the change tracking brigade: it won’t even let you turn it off until you’ve accepted all changes to the document. If you want to export a clean copy, you have to choose ‘Save a copy as final’ from the tracking toolbar, a process that automatically incorporates all the suggested changes – whether accepted or not – and deletes all comments.
Pages does have some compensations, including a neat way to limit the spaghetti-like clutter of multiple comments that can often render an amended document unreadable. If you click the disclosure arrow under the Tracking Bubbles heading in the left margin and choose ‘Show only for selection’, only those amendments that relate to the currently selected text, or the paragraph around the cursor’s current position show up, so it’s much easier to identify the text to which comments and amendments relate.
As anyone who uses Change Tracking will testify, making a simple change to a document’s typeface can make it look as if the digital equivalent of Attila the Hun has romped unchecked through the text. Mercifully, you can opt not to show formatting changes, and pause tracking through a slider to allow you to temporarily make amendments and comments without being tracked.
Change Tracking in Pages is impressively adept at working with Word, too. No matter how many times I’ve flung documents between Word and Pages over the past few days, comments and amendments are the one thing that remain resolutely unchanged.
Interoperability is so good that I’m sure the ability to share tracked documents with Word users is the reason Pages has a change tracking feature. After all, how many Mac users use Pages in an office environment that requires this sort of collaboration?
However, Change Tracking isn’t just about collaborating with others. I’ve now pressed it into use as a rudimentary versioning system. I’ve bemoaned Pages’ lack of a versioning tool in these pages in the past, but you can use Change Tracking to fill this gap up to a point. If you’re writing or revising a document, simply turn on tracking at the revision stage and you can keep a copy of your changes.
However, what if you want to track multiple versions of the same file? As each amendment appears in a set colour according to the author of the amendments, I first tried changing the author colour from the Tracking bar’s drop-down menu to distinguish fresh changes from previous edits, but Pages automatically changes all previous amendments or comments made by the same author to the same colour. What you need to do is to change your author name in the program’s preferences, and then choose a different colour. As long as you’ve saved and opened the document between these changes. Pages assumes you’re a different person and subsequent edits can be marked in different colours.
This feature comes into its own if you’re working on a few ideas in Pages’ Layout mode because, much to my initial surprise, tracking changes works in layout documents, too. That’s quite a big deal, particularly as I’m not aware of any other layout application offering such a feature.
When in Pages’ Layout mode, you can track changes both in text and to objects such as shapes and images. If I scale or move an image, for example, Pages tracks this change, and if I later come back to it and reject the change, the image will revert to its original location. As you move page elements around the page, the tracking bubbles attached to them flow with them. The only things it doesn’t seem to track properly are tables and charts. If you edit a table’s contents in Pages, it acknowledges the fact that you’ve added new text, but it won’t revert to the previous version if you don’t accept this amendment.
Still, emboldened at Pages’ relative success as a versioning system, I’ve tried Pages as an all-round creative tool, pressing it into action as a note organiser. It does this job pretty well, too. Obviously, you can add general notes to the margin of a draft using the Comments function, but I’ve also used it to collate various short notes kept in TextEdit files. Adding them to a Pages document is as simple as dragging the file over the Pages document window. To keep the notes organised, I keep them separate from the main body of the document by adding them to a separate section (Insert > Section Break). These sections can be kept organised by turning on Page Thumbnails and dragging the thumbnails to rearrange them.
Not perfect, but surprisingly workable.
Tom Gorham
