Track Changes

Question

Hi,

I'm quite new to Confluence.

I have training documents that are viewable to the public in Confluence. I want to be able to edit these, have an internal staff member review my changes, make their own changes, I then review their changes and so on until we are happy with the final product and then publish to the public.

Normally I would use a Word document and track changes but importing from Word is pretty difficult (especially for large documents with images, tables, hyperlinks etc) as the formatting etc can be lost (I've been told). We may also only be editing one small section within the document and therefore don't want to import the whole thing.

What is the best way to manage this?

Thanks

NetPotential Support Team · Answer

It's not as intuitive, but it's easy enough: every time anyone makes a change, they then need to click on Close rather than Publish, this would allow everyone to track and review before updating the official document.

This means that the changes made remain in Draft mode, ready to be reviewed.

Once you click Close all the changes made won't appear in the published document, but they're still visible to anyone who clicks on the Edit pencil.

If the changes made don't stand out for whatever reason, Confluence has put a very useful tool to show the changes made:

Once the changes have been reviewed and approved by everyone, you can then press Publish to make the changes live.

I hope it helps :)

unknown · Answer

Thanks for the quick reply. Does this allow me to track changes? So if I make a small change, I don't want my staff to have to review the entire document or try to guess what changes I've made. I just want them to be able to identify them straight away and only review the changes. And same for me when they make changes.

Basically - is there a feature that works the same as track changes within Word?

Thanks

NetPotential Support Team · Answer

You can always create a new page in Confluence, there's lots of different options available:

That ensures you can then allow as many people as you like to edit, you can view changes and revert to last published version, add comments, and print out (top right of the Confluence page) if it's documents you then need to physically hand out for training purposes.