Why can't I see tracked changes in Word?

By Check Before Send · Updated 8 October 2026

If Word shows a clean page where you expected edits, the changes are usually still in the document and only hidden by a display setting. Four settings control what you see. Check them in this order.

1. The markup view

On the Review tab, Word has a display option for how tracked changes are shown. Microsoft's page on tracking changes in Word describes the four choices:

View	What Microsoft says it does
Simple Markup	Displays tracked changes with a red line in the margin
All Markup	Displays tracked changes with different colors of text and lines for each reviewer
No Markup	Hides the markup to show the document with changes incorporated
Original	Displays the original document without tracked changes and comments showing

So if you see only a red line in the margin, that is Simple Markup working as designed. If you see a clean document, you are probably in No Markup or Original. Switch to All Markup to see every change in place.

The Show Markup menu on the same tab decides which kinds of change are drawn. Microsoft lists Insertions and Deletions, Formatting and Specific People. If one of them is switched off, changes of that kind will not appear, and if a reviewer is deselected under Specific People their changes will not appear either. The All Reviewers option selects or clears every reviewer at once.

3. The Reviewing Pane

Still on the Review tab, choose Reviewing Pane and pick vertical, to show it beside your document, or horizontal, to show it below. The pane gives a summary of the tracked changes and comments in the document. If someone else made the edits, who last edited the file is stored in the document as well.

4. Whether Track Changes is on

Track Changes is turned on from the Review tab, under Tracking, by choosing Track Changes; Microsoft says you can then track everyone's changes or Just Mine. Switching it on only affects edits you make from then on. It does not bring back hidden changes that are already in the file, and it is separate from the view you set in step 1.

Hidden is not removed

The first two settings change only what Word draws on your screen. They do not take the changes out of the file. A document that looks clean in No Markup can still hold every insertion and deletion, and so can the copy you email. In the file itself a tracked change is stored as its own element: Microsoft's Open XML documentation shows a formatting change recorded with the author's name and the date, and describes tracked insertions and deletions as revisions of the same kind.

To show what that looks like, we ran Check Before Send on a small Word file we made for this purpose, with one tracked insertion and one tracked deletion. The content of that file was invented for the test. Its report listed "Recorded changes: 1 insertion(s), 1 deletion(s)".

That matters if text was deleted for a reason: a price, a name, a sentence you did not want the other side to read. Whether the document is displayed with markup on your screen says nothing about what the file you send contains.

Check a document before you send it

Check Before Send reads the .docx file in your browser and lists what is recorded in it, including tracked changes, comments and hidden text, with the actual counts and values shown. You choose what to remove and it makes a new copy, leaving your original as it is, then opens that copy again and scans it a second time. A row shows "Verified not found" only if the second scan no longer finds it.

It works on .docx files only; older .doc files are not supported yet. "Verified not found" means the second scan found nothing, not that a file is guaranteed clean. The document is never uploaded, and the Trust Center has a way to confirm that yourself.

Sources

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