Word: Track Changes: Moves

April 3, 2014

Based on a Writing Tip I wrote for my team.

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Some people on my team have asked why Microsoft Word doesn’t always show moved text as a move (double green underline by default), even though ‘track moves’ is turned on (Review tab > drop-down arrow next to Track Changes button > Change Tracking Options).

I investigated the circumstances under which moves are *meant* to be tracked in Word. Despite the official word on this from Microsoft, the reality is that tracking moves in Word is flaky—sometimes full sentences aren’t tracked as moves and just show as deletions/insertions, which isn’t what’s meant to happen. And that’s very frustrating.

The *official* word is that moves should be tracked under these circumstances:

Select sentence or more, then drag and drop it at the new location.
Select sentence or more, cut it (Ctrl+X), then paste (Ctrl+V) at the new location.

Moves are NOT tracked under these circumstances

Copy sentence (Ctrl+C) or more, then paste (Ctrl+V) at new location.
Dragging/copying/pasting individual words/phrases that don’t constitute a complete sentence (or more).

NOTE: Moving individual words and phrases is never tracked as a move, only moving whole sentences and parts of subsequent sentences, thus if you move a full sentence that includes a word or two of the next sentence, Word should track that as a move. However, as I said, tracking moves is very flaky and it might or might not work as designed.

10 comments

I’ve also found that sections that already contain tracked changes won’t be marked as “moved”. For instance, in working with a big document, I’d done a search and replace on all smart quotes. When I wanted to move a paragraph containing some of those altered quote marks, I had to reject the changes before Word would show it as “moved” instead of just deleted/inserted. I then remade the changes in the new location.
by Charlotte Nash June 3, 2014 at 1:47 pm
Charlotte Nash, you are a genius. You solved my problem. The move feature does not work when it includes material that has tracked changes.
by John Majors July 25, 2014 at 1:02 am
Hi this is very help full for me thanks allot
by Zahir August 17, 2014 at 3:09 pm
I have just worked out the same thing about paragraphs or sentences that already have tracked changes in them. Absolutely maddening! Is there not a proper Microsoft guide to this stuff somewhere
by Rupert January 22, 2015 at 1:20 am
My solution is to turn off tracking, copy and past the passage, and add a comment indicating that the passage was moved and where it came from. The copy-paste process preserves tracked changes if tracking is turned off. This allows me to edit a passage and then move it if I find a better place for it.
by John Morris August 10, 2015 at 4:30 am
Thanks a lot for this. Saved me the frustration of thinking I was doing something wrong. I just want to move phrases, not entire sentences. Word does not accept this as a “move” as you correctly pointed out. Very annoying.
by Solotrader April 17, 2016 at 8:17 pm
For what it’s worth, I’ve followed all of the guidance I could find, including here, to get Word 2016 to track moving text based on the options and it still shows up as deleted and pasted text.
by Michael December 21, 2017 at 11:29 pm
Works beautifully in Word 2013 – thanks for this awesome tip!
by Joanne Stover December 15, 2018 at 12:00 am
I have found that it rarely works regardless of the amount of text moved. Based on your description of it’s intended function, it simply doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.
by PRW Hunt June 28, 2019 at 10:20 pm
Thank you all for the insight. I tried everything I could think of and nothing seemed to work. Instead, when I move four or more lines of text, it showed up as “deleted” in the section moved from, and “inserted” in the section moved to. The cut and paste works sometimes, but not as it should.
by Sandy January 10, 2022 at 5:13 am