Open the document in Writer. Review tab. Turn Track Changes on before you edit, not after you have already rewritten three pages in the dark. If you forgot, you cannot magically invent a redline of the past. Compare against the last emailed copy instead (Review → Compare, if your build offers it; otherwise use Word for that one job).
Views that matter
All Markup is for editing. You see insertions, deletions, and comments. Simple Markup is for reading the proposed text with a stripe in the margin. No Markup is a preview of the accepted world — it is not the same as accepting. Original is the starting point. Students fail exams by exporting PDF from All Markup and sending a rainbow of balloons to a professor who asked for a clean paper.
Accept and reject like an adult
Walk comment by comment, change by change. Accept All is for when you trust the other person with your name on the file. Reject All is for when you opened the wrong attachment. After you finish, search for leftover comment marks. Save As a new name: contract-clean-2026-08-21.docx. Then export PDF from the clean file.
Authors and balloons
Sign in if you want your name on comments; otherwise you are “User” forever. That is fine for a solo draft. It is not fine for a five-person policy paper. If balloons pile on the right edge and hide text, switch to inline comments or widen the window. Printing: comments can eat a tree. Print without markup unless the assignment is the redline itself.
Legal and school caveats
Some courts and journals still want Word. If the other side’s counsel lives in Word, round-trip a sample with nested comments before you bet a filing on WPS. Tracked changes that vanish or duplicate on round-trip are a known class of compatibility bugs across all clones — test, do not assume.
Protect the redline
If you send a file for review, say so in the email: “please use Track Changes.” If they type in No Markup, you will never see what they did without Compare. Password-to-modify (not to open) is a polite lock. It will not stop a determined copy-paste into a new file.
Related: Writer guide · recovery.
Emailing a redline
Subject line: “redline of the 21 Aug draft.” Body: “please Review → All Markup.” Attach the DOCX, not a screenshot of balloons. If the other person only reads PDF, export with markup on purpose and say so. Mixing “here is a clean PDF” and an unmarked DOCX with hidden changes is how lawsuits get spicy. After they return the file, save as a new date immediately so Recents does not look like one file.
When two people edited copies
You now have three documents: original, Ali’s copy, Noor’s copy. Compare original→Ali, original→Noor, then merge by hand. There is no honest three-way merge in a consumer office suite. Next time, one owner or cloud co-edit. Related: recovery if someone overwrote.