Track changes in Word vs Sideline email track changes in Outlook

How is track changes in Word different to Sideline email track changes in Outlook?

The native track changes feature in Word and the Sideline Outlook Add-in both provide users with an easy way to automatically show edits made to documents (Word) or emails (Outlook).

Turning on track changes in Word enables a live tracking feature. A redline against the original document is shown in real time as you make edits.

On the other hand, Sideline takes an 'edit-first, show redline-second' approach. Track changes are not 'turned on', but rather 'run' or 'applied' once the edits to the original email have been made in clean.While this is slightly different to how track changes works in Word, users have told us that it’s easy to pick up.

How does Sideline email track changes in Outlook work in practice?

 Let's say a junior has prepared a draft email and sent it to their supervisor for review.

If this was a Word document, the supervisor would turn on track changes and start making their edits. Given this is an email though, the supervisor can click 'reply' and then make their edits in clean initially.

The supervisor can check the extent of their edits at anytime, by clicking a button in Sideline to view a comparison against the original email. 

Once the edits are completed, the supervisor can either

• Option 1: Send the email as is (i.e. in clean); or
• Option 2: Convert the clean edits into a redline.

Option 1 is best if the supervisor is in a hurry, working from their phone, or wants to send the edited email out directly themselves. In that case, they can simply click 'send'. Once the junior receives the edited email (including if they are forwarded a copy of it later on), they can useSideline to automatically run a comparison to see the changes against the original draft (or indeed any other interim draft).

Option 2 can be useful if the supervisor wants to send the edited email back to the junior as a redline. In that case, the supervisor can select the relevant section of the email they want to show as a redline, and then click a button in Sideline to automatically apply the relevant styling(red/strikethrough for deletions, and blue/underline for insertions). Once the junior receives the redlined email, Sideline has an accept/reject feature similar to the equivalent feature in Word.

The use cases for Sideline are not limited to junior-supervisor relationships. Many lawyers use Sideline to collaborate internally on an equal footing or with their clients, or even when making edits to wording that's been extracted from a document and put into the body of an email for negotiation.

What metadata is added by track changes in Word compared to Sideline email track changes in Outlook? 

Any tracked change in Word includes metadata that references the author of that change and timestamp. You can view this information by hovering your mouse over the change. This metadata can be cleaned and anonymised (see here for example), but not completely disabled.

Sideline does not add any metadata to emails. If you hover your mouse over, or right click, any text in an email that's been formatted as redline by Sideline, nothing special happens. This is because text formatted as redline by Sideline is the same as if you had manually styled it as red/strikethrough or blue/underline yourself. There's no need to scrub potentially sensitive metadata because there is no metadata.

On a related note, you can rest assured that users ofSideline can only see the revision history of emails where they already have access to those previous versions. If, for example, an external party receives an email that has gone through a few rounds of changes internally on your side, there is no way they can see those previous edits even if they have Sideline.This is because Sideline only has access to emails that exist within a user's own mailbox.

We'd be happy to explain any of this in more detail and you can even test out Sideline yourself with a free trial. Contact us here today.