Revising a Word or Excel Document

Important: Revising a document sends it back to Draft status where the document owner must restart the review and approval process. You may want to consider starting a discussion thread first (see Starting a Discussion) to avoid unnecessary process delays.

With a Word or Excel document open that you've been assigned to review or approve, click Revise, and then click Revise again to confirm.

Note: If you see an alert like the one below, it means that another user (another approver or an administrator) is working on the document. You will not be able to revise the document until the other user closes it. If you want to be notified when the document is available, select Notify me by email when the document is no longer checked out, and then click OK to clear the warning.

Do one of the following, depending on what you see:

If the document opens immediately in the Edit Document tab, move on to step 3.

If you see the following prompt, do one of the following:

If this is a Word document and you have the desktop version of Word, we recommend clicking Open in Office so you can see how Word marks up your revisions with the Track Changes feature. Plus, you will be able to see the marked up revisions other reviewers or approvers have already made.

Note: You cannot turn off Track Changes while revising a Word document in review or approval.

Click Open with Microsoft Office Online to open the document for editing in Word Online or Excel Online. Your changes will be tracked using Track Changes, but you will not see the markup.

Make your revisions.

Important: If you're revising a Word document, your changes are captured by Word's Track Changes feature, whether you can actually see the markup or not. You cannot turn off Track Changes.

Note: If you're revising an Excel document, consider adding comments to or highlighting any cells you change so the document owner can quickly see your revisions without having to compare draft versions.

When you've completed your revisions, click Done Revising.

Note: If you're not finished with revisions but need to close the document for now, click Finish Later.

Type a brief explanation or description of your revisions.

Important: You can't move on until you type an explanation.

(Optional) To add what you wrote to this document's discussion board, select Post to Discussion Board (see Working with Discussions for details).
Click Save, and then click OK.