A window into your editing

Anil Dash shares the story of a job seeker who sent a resume electronically with "Track Changes" enabled. That means a Word-savvy employer can see exactly how you edited your resume, all the tweaks to job titles and dates. Or, as Anil puts it, "It just means your potential employer can actually watch your lies being written in front of them."

The Track Changes function can be a handy way to edit a document but keep the original intact. You can go back later and decide if you want to keep all your changes. But without fixing the document at the end, everyone else can see the changes, too.

Safeguarding your document isn't as easy as turning off Track Changes before hitting send. Microsoft offers instructions:

1. On the View menu, point to Toolbars, and then click Reviewing.
2. On the Reviewing toolbar, click Show, and then make sure that a check mark appears next to each of the following items:
Comments
Ink Annotations (Word 2003 only)
Insertions and Deletions
Formatting
Reviewers (Point to Reviewers and make sure that All Reviewers is selected.)

If a check mark does not appear next to an item, click the item to select it.

3. On the Reviewing toolbar, click Next to advance from one revision or comment to the next.
4. On the Reviewing toolbar, click Accept Change or Reject Change/Delete Comment for each revision or comment.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until all the revisions in the document have been accepted or rejected and all the comments have been deleted.

This seems to make the Track Changes function less convenient after all.