Track, Accept and Reject Changes in LibreOffice Writer

This guide explains the review mechanism in LibreOffice Writer documents which helps you to track, accept, and reject changes.

When you are working with a document that needs review by multiple people, the built-in review mechanism in LibreOffice is helpful. It provides all the basic tracking, commenting required for an effective review.

These review options give you the ability to enable track changes in your document and distribute so that any change can be highlighted and reviewed.

How to Track, Accept and Reject Changes in LibreOffice Writer

LibreOffice Writer provides below options for Track Changes.

It has options to record the changes, show/hide, manage, browse the changes in the document. It also provides a way to accept or reject the changes as part of the review process in a document.

You can also find these options in a toolbar via View -> Track Changes.

Start the Changes

To start the track changes in any document, from menu select Edit -> Track Changes -> Record Or press Shift + Ctrl + C. Once you do that your document is in review mode.

Any change you do now would be highlighted based on the changes you are making.

For example, if you delete any portion of the document, it would be highlighted like this. Note that the author’s name, date, and time of the change also recorded.

When you save the document and distribute it via email or any means, all the changes would be highlighted and send over. That means, whoever opens up the document, can see all the changes including who made them.

Accept and Reject

The changes can be reveiewed and accepted/rejected from the context menu. Right-click on the changed portion and click Accept Changes or Reject Changes. If you like you can add comments as well.

If you accept, the changes become part of the document; If you reject the modification done is removed and that portion becomes Orginal before modification.

Protect, Compare and Merge

You can also password protect the track changes document. Simply click on the protect icon from the toolbar or select from the menu. In the next window enter a password to protect.

You can also compare or merge the current document with another document. It would give you a nice merge and comparison view of delete and insert highlighted.

I hope this would help you to get started with the track changes review options in LibreOffice Writer. Let me know in the comment below if you have any comments.