Chapter 44 · Working With Others
Suggestion Mode and Tracked Changes
Suggestion mode turns your typing into a proposal. Your words go onto the page where you put them, marked as yours, and the words you delete stay visible with a line through them until somebody decides. It is how a reviewer works on a draft that is not theirs, and it is worth having on your own drafts too, any time you want to see what a pass actually changed before you commit to it.
Turning Suggest on
Open the Review tab in the ribbon, the second from the right, beside View. The first group holds New Comment and a checkbox labelled Suggest, whose tooltip reads Suggestion mode: edits become tracked changes. Tick it and you are in.
Ticking it also switches the right-hand rail to its Changes tab, so the list you are about to fill is already in front of you.
There is no keyboard shortcut for it. On a document you own, the setting is stored with the document, so Suggest is still on the next time you open it and you do not have to remember. On a document somebody shared with you, the toggle works for the session but is not saved: the server applies document settings only for the owner.
Suggest is not retroactive. It marks what you write while it is on, and it has nothing to say about what you wrote before. Turn it on first, then make the pass.
What a change looks like
Two kinds of mark, in one colour per person:
- Inserted text appears in your colour, underlined.
- Deleted text stays exactly where it is, in your colour, struck through. Backspace and Delete mark rather than remove.
Select a sentence and type over it and both happen at once: the old sentence is struck and kept, and your replacement lands after it, marked as an insertion. Pasting over a selection and cutting one behave the same way, which is the point. A suggested rewrite that quietly destroyed the original would not be a suggestion.
The name on a change is the part of your email address before the @, and your
colour is chosen from six by that name, so the same person is always the same colour on the same
page.
Three details worth knowing before you go through a draft with this on:
- Backspacing over your own unaccepted insertion removes it for real. Text that was never in the document does not need a suggestion proposing that it leave. Backspacing over somebody else's suggestion marks it deleted instead, so one person's pass can never silently erase another's.
- Footnotes, images and page breaks are proposed for deletion, not destroyed. They carry no text to strike, so they used to slip through and go for good. A footnote marked deleted is also left out of the Notes list at the end of the printed copy, because it is not in the piece you would be printing.
- Formatting is not tracked. Bold, italics, headings, lists, colour and tables change the document directly even with Suggest on, because the change tracker marks runs of inserted and deleted text and a bold run is a different kind of change entirely. Clearing formatting deliberately leaves insertion, deletion and comment marks alone, so that button cannot quietly accept somebody's pass.
The Changes rail
The right-hand rail carries a Changes tab with a count beside the label. Each entry shows a pill reading insert or delete, the author's name in their colour, and the text itself. Jump selects that run in the manuscript and scrolls to it.
With nothing to show, the rail says No tracked changes and tells you to turn on Suggest and edit. The list refreshes as you type while Suggest is on, and whenever the Changes tab is the one on screen, so the positions it holds stay honest while you work above them.
Accepting and rejecting
Each entry an owner sees carries Accept and Reject beside Jump. What they do depends on which kind of change it is:
| Change | Accept | Reject |
|---|---|---|
| An insertion | The text stays and loses its marking. | The text is removed. |
| A deletion | The text is removed. | The text stays and loses its marking. |
A single Accept or Reject runs on the click, with no confirmation. Accept all and Reject all sit at the top of the rail and ask first, with Accept all tracked changes? or Reject all tracked changes?. Both take the whole document, including other people's suggestions, so read the rail before you reach for them.
Resolving a change rewrites the document, which is why it belongs to whoever owns it. On a shared document the two buttons are not rendered at all, and the rail offers only Jump. A control that looks available and then refuses is worse than a control that is not there.
If a resolve goes somewhere you did not want, the document's version history is the way back. Chapter 7 covers restoring, which backs up your current text first and so costs you nothing to try.
From the reviewer's side
Somebody who arrives on a reviewer link finds Suggest already on and the checkbox disabled. That is not a nag, it is the only way their saves are accepted: the server compares each of their saves against the stored document with suggestions resolved away, and refuses anything that moved a word, a heading or a bold run. The formatting controls are disabled for them too, carrying the tooltip Reviewers suggest and comment. The owner formats and restructures.
Somebody on an editor link writes into the draft directly and can turn Suggest on and off as they like. Neither role can accept or reject. Chapter 43 has the full division, the refusal message, and what to do when an invite link will not open.
Counts, checks, and exports
An open pass sits in the document, so different readouts count it differently. This is deliberate, and it is the thing people ask about most:
| Reader | Struck text |
|---|---|
| Word count in the status bar | Counted. It reports the page in front of you. |
| Screenplay page estimate | Skipped. |
| Running time on a two-column video script | Skipped. |
| The plain-text file from Export | Skipped. |
| A fact check or continuity pass | Counted, alongside the proposed wording. |
That last row is the one to plan around. A check run over a document with a pass still open reads both the struck wording and the words proposed to replace it, and reports on a version of the text that nobody is going to publish. Resolve the pass, then check. Chapter 35 covers what the check reads.
Find and Replace works with Suggest on, and behaves itself: each replacement strikes the original and inserts the new wording after it, and the search skips struck runs so Replace does not keep finding the text it has just marked. Chapter 11 has the rest of it.
Getting a resolved draft out as PDF, Word, Final Draft or Fountain belongs to Part VIII. Nothing in this chapter changes what those writers do; they read the document after you have made your decisions.
When something is not where you left it
- That change has moved. The list has been refreshed. You clicked an entry whose text has shifted since the rail drew it, usually because editing happened above it. Nothing was resolved and nothing was lost. The list is now current, so click again.
- The rail is empty and you were sure you edited something. Suggest was off when you made the change. It is an ordinary edit now and it stays one.
- Suggest keeps coming back off on a shared document. Expected. The setting is saved for the owner only. A reviewer never has to think about it, because their toggle is forced on.
- A suggestion you made has turned into ordinary text. Somebody accepted it. Accepted insertions lose their marking and read as part of the draft, which is what accepting means.
Comments are the other half of a review pass, and they work differently: a comment sits beside the text rather than proposing a change to it. Part VII covers them next.
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