Overview
Microsoft Teams is growing in popularity on-campus, and along with that groups are using the built-in features to enhance their collaboration.
One of those is Teams ability to organize documents together for group collaboration. When working with Microsoft Office documents, Teams has a limited ability to edit those documents. When you need more power than Teams or Word/Excel Online has such as working with Track Changes, you need to use the full version of the accompanying product.
Here is a quick overview on how to use Microsoft Teams, coupled with Sharepoint File Storage, to edit Word, Excel or Powerpoint documents with Track Changes turned on.
Directions
- From your Microsoft Teams account, click on the FILES tab.
- Then find the file that you need to work within and right-click on that file. This will bring up the context sensitive menu.
- Next, left-click on Open in Word - this will launch Microsoft Word on your computer, and requires that you already have Word installed. Don't have Office installed? Click here for instructions.
- This will cause a Microsoft Office Warning Dialog box to pop up, warning you that some files contain bad things. In this case, this is a trusted file from a trusted source. Click yes.
- After clicking Yes, Microsoft Word will open in View Only mode. This is to protect you, your computer and the document. Your screen will look something like this.
- To actively work on this document, you will have to click VIEW and then EDIT DOCUMENT.
- This will show you your document in the more familiar Word editing view.
- As you work, you will see your changes in color along with a line near where you made changes, but that is all. In this restricted Track Changes view, the editor does not see details on markups by default. Everything else should work as you are used to.
