Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Change Tracking for the iPad.

Change Tracking (also known as "tracked changes" or "red lining") is a feature which is very important for business users. For a lot of people reviewing change tracked documents is their daily business. Losing the change tracking information on the iPad make the iPad useless (or of limited use) for business users.

Therefore we decided that the Native OOXML layout engine should have change tracking support. That pretty much screwed up our schedules and release dates, but we felt that change tracking is so essential for business users that its worth doing. Six month later we are happy to announce change tracking support for text insertions, text deletions and comments. Here is what is looks like on the iPad:



You can quickly review all changes made to the document in the side bar. A simple tap on a side bar item brings you to the corresponding change and vice versa.
There is even an additional feature badly missing in Word. You can assign a color to an author by simply tapping on the colored square:



The assignment will be permanent across documents which makes it much quicker to review a document.

We will start a public beta test soon.