Tracking changes in Outlook? Yes you can!

Why doesn’t track changes exist natively in Outlook? As one Microsoft forum contributor put it: ‘It seems absurd that you can't track changes in Outlook email given the hundreds of features included.’

The usual workarounds are to either:

• copy & paste the draft email into Word, collaborate there using track changes (usually by emailing that document back and forth between collaborators), then copy & paste the finalised draft back into Outlook; or
• manually style/highlight each edit as you go along in Outlook.

Both options are incredibly tedious and painful.

So why hasn’t this problem been solved by the Outlook team?

I obviously can’t speak for Microsoft, but my best guess is that it’s just not an important enough feature for a big enough proportion of their (extremely broad) user base. Out of all the things Microsoft could spend their time on, and there must be a million things on that list, enabling track changes natively in Outlook probably isn’t a priority.

That’s understandable, but it doesn’t help those people for whom the lack of track changes in Outlook is an acute problem.

But you don’t need to settle for this.

You don’t need to waste your time submitting a suggestion to the Outlook feedback portal.

You can fix this problem now by getting a free trial of Sideline. We’ve had law firms clear IT security checks and start using Sideline within 4 hours of submitting the form on our homepage.

If your organisation would love the ability to track changes on Outlook emails, please get in touch today. This is a problem that can be solved.