Microsoft Word 2007 makes it easy to track changes, enter comments and review the changes in a document. But before you begin, you should have a clear editorial plan.
One of the first questions to answer in setting up your editorial process is how to name your files. Even one writer/editor working alone may end up creating many different versions of the same file. Naming the different versions clearly is important. When you have several people working on a document, giving different versions clear names becomes an absolute necessity.
A naming system used in many editorial offices is the author's name followed by a keyword indicating the version. The keywords are predefined and agreed upon by everyone who will work on the document. Some examples of keywords are Draft, Original, Revised, Edited, Approved, Marked-up, Final. If you have multiple documents by the same author, you might use a short title instead of the author's name. For ease of organization, you might want to put the keyword before, instead of after, the name or title.
Author + Keyword
- Smith Original
- Smith Revised
- Smith Final
Keyword + Short Title
- ORIGINAL Publicity Report
- EDITED Publicity Report
- FINAL Publicity Report
Keyword + Dash + Short Title
- DRAFT–Operations proposal
- REVISED–Operations proposal
- REV2–Operations proposal
- REV3–Operations proposal
- FINAL–Operations proposal
***
Join Jennie in our online classes (she'll be teaching two upcoming classes for IconLogic): Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts and Editing with Microsoft Word 2007.