Have you ever wanted (or needed) to be an incognito editor, a covert reviewer, or a clandestine collaborator? If so, this post is for you—or for your secret identity—because it demonstrates how to change your user name for Track Changes in Microsoft Word.
The images below are from Word 2016. However, the steps are the same in Word 2019, Word 2013, and Word 2010.
Important Note: These steps should be completed before you use Word’s Track Changes tool because they don’t change the name associated with existing edits or comments. Word doesn’t have a straightforward way to change user names connected to existing edits or comments. However, you can replace user names with the default label Author for all existing and future edits and comments, as shown in “How to Remove User Names from Existing Track Changes in Microsoft Word.”
1. Select the Review tab.
2. Select the Change Tracking Options launcher.
3. Select the Change User Name button in the Track Changes Options dialog box.
4. Change the user name and/or the initials in the Word Options dialog box.
5. Check the box in front of “Always use these values regardless of sign in to Office” if you want to save these changes for future documents.
6. Select the OK button to save your changes.
Your updated user name should now appear when you add new comments and edits.
My next post will demonstrate how to change the user name for the comment and mark-up (editing) tools in Adobe Acrobat DC—because no one wants to go undercover in Word only to be uncovered in Acrobat. Stay stealthy, my friends!
Thank you so much!!!
You are very welcome! Thank you for stopping by!
Is there a way to change the name for EXISTING comments? I need to change “Tom” to “Sue.” Thanks.
Hello, thank you for visiting my blog. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t offer a straightforward way to change the name for existing comments in Word. I hope they will offer that option in the future.
Thanks very much, Erin.
Most of what Microsoft offers isnt straightforward but there is almost always a way.
” Change all existing Track Changes authors to one name:
1. Save a copy of the original Track Changes document, name it V1, and reject all Track Changes in it.
2. Save a copy of the original Track Changes document, name it V2, and accept all Track Changes in it. If not accepted now, they will be accepted later on in the Word Compare process.
3. Open V1 in Word > Review tab > Compare > Compare.
4. In the “Compare Documents” dialog, navigate to and select V1 as Original Document, and then V2 as Revised Document; type desired name after “Label changes with”; after “Show changes in,” select “New document,” click OK. “
Hello, Bob. Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately, these steps only change the user name for insertions and deletions. They don’t change the user name for existing comments, at least not in Word 2016. Hopefully Microsoft will provide a solution in a future version of Word.
perfect that worked well!
Excellent! Thank you for the feedback!
Thank you for this post. Tagging changes with a different names allowed me to tag document changes related to different projects where we were not certain which project would finish first. Using this feature and some creative file copying allowed us to push through changes for the first finished project and then the next afterwards without having to maintain multiple copies/versions of the same document.
Thank you for reading my post, Robert!