Tracked changes & review
Writespect is built on one assumption: you review every change. Everything on this page follows from that.
Tracked changes
When the document is open in Word, edits can arrive as ordinary Word revisions; insertions underlined, deletions struck through, a change bar in the margin, a balloon naming what changed. You accept or reject each one exactly as you would a colleague’s.
You choose the default in Preferences:
- Follow the document’s setting; track when Word’s own Track Changes is on. This preserves the document’s existing review setting.
- Always track AI edits; every edit is a revision, whatever the document says.
- Never track AI edits; edits go in clean. Fine for your own rough draft; think before using it on anything that leaves your desk.
An individual instruction can always override the default; just say “make this as a tracked change” or “no tracked changes for this one”.
Why tracked changes need the document open
Word is what records revisions. When Writespect edits a saved .docx that isn’t
open in Word, there is no Word involved to record anything. Rather than quietly
making an untracked edit when you asked for a tracked one, Writespect refuses
and says why. Open the document and ask again.
Snapshots
Before every change, Writespect saves a complete copy of the document to its own folder on your machine. This is the undo of last resort: even if an edit is accepted, saved and closed, the previous version is still there.
You can ask the assistant to undo the last edit or restore an earlier snapshot.
Snapshots are:
- Local. They never leave your computer.
- Complete copies. A snapshot of a 40-page document is a 40-page document, so they use real disk space.
- Yours to control. Set how long they’re kept and how many per document in Preferences, and delete them whenever you like.
If you work under a retention or data-handling policy, these are the files to point it at. They live in your local application data folder, alongside the log.
Undo
Most instructions land as a single entry on Word’s undo stack. One Ctrl+Z reverses one instruction; not part of one, and not several at once. Header and footer edits are the exception because Word cannot safely group those operations, so reversing one may require several Ctrl+Z presses.
The refusals, and why they exist
Writespect would rather stop than guess. Each of these exists because the alternative is a silent wrong edit:
- Several documents open and none named; it refuses instead of picking the window you last clicked.
- Word may have the file open where Writespect can’t see it (Protected View, or a Word running as administrator); it refuses to write to the file on disk, because Word would overwrite that on its next save.
- A tracked edit on a closed document; refused rather than made untracked.
- An edit based on a stale reading; if the assistant pinned what it read and the document has moved since, the edit fails rather than landing in the wrong place.
A refusal always says what to do about it.
Reviewing well
A few habits that make review quick rather than a chore:
- Ask for small changes. Small edits mean small reviews.
- Read back what it says it changed. Writespect reports the paragraph it touched by printed number, with a snippet.
- Use the redline for anything that leaves your desk. Compare against the version your reader last saw, and send Word’s own redline.
- Accept as you go. A document with two hundred outstanding revisions is harder to reason about than one you’ve kept clean.