How the Founding Fathers Could Have Used Microsoft Word

Consider the summer of 1776. Thomas Jefferson sat in a rented room in Philadelphia with a quill pen, a bottle of ink, and the monumental task of drafting a document that would change the world. Every revision meant crossing out lines, rewriting paragraphs, and passing the parchment to John Adams and Benjamin Franklin for edits — by hand. The whole process took weeks of painstaking correspondence.

Now imagine if the Continental Congress had Microsoft Word. Comments in the margins. Tracked changes. A shared document. Jefferson might have finished by lunch.

(In fact, you can see exactly what a Word-drafted Declaration of Independence might have looked like — including some spirited "edits" from Adams — in this fun video: Word 2010: Declaration of Independence.)

This July 4th marks the 250th anniversary of the document Jefferson labored over that summer. In its honor, here are three Word collaboration features that your own team can use today to work the way the Founders wished they could have.

Use Track Changes to review and accept edits without losing the original

1. Open your document in Word and go to the Review tab on the ribbon.
2. Click Track Changes to turn it on. From that point forward, every addition, deletion, or formatting change will be marked and color-coded by author.
3. Share the document with your collaborators. Their edits will appear in a different color from yours.
4. When you are ready to finalize the document, go back to the Review tab, click the Accept dropdown, and choose Accept All Changes — or review them one at a time using the Previous and Next arrows.

Use Comments to leave notes and questions without altering the text

1. Highlight the word, sentence, or paragraph you want to comment on.
2. Go to the Review tab and click New Comment.
3. Type your note in the comment bubble that appears in the margin. You can tag a colleague with @TheirName to send them a notification.
4. When the comment has been addressed, click the three-dot menu on the comment and choose Resolve to close it without deleting it.

Use Styles to keep formatting consistent throughout a long document

1. On the Home tab, locate the Styles gallery in the ribbon.
2. Click into any heading in your document, then click Heading 1, Heading 2, or Heading 3 in the Styles gallery to apply a consistent style.
3. For body text, click the Normal style. Once you have applied styles throughout the document, any global formatting change — font, size, color — can be made in one place and will update everywhere automatically.
4. To modify a style, right-click it in the gallery and choose Modify. Change the font or color and click OK. Every instance of that style in the document updates instantly.

The takeaway

Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin were brilliant men — but they were working with quills. Give your team these Word tools, and you will wonder how you ever drafted anything collaboratively without them.

This Independence Day, as we mark 250 years since that document was presented to Congress, it's worth remembering: the hardest part of writing something important has never been the writing itself — it's the revising, the reviewing, and the getting-everyone-on-the-same-page. Word just makes that part a lot less painful than it was for the Founders.