Change bars

Change bars help you automatically or manually indicate the changed lines or paragraphs in a document.

A change bar is a vertical line that visually identifies new or revised text. You can have change bars appear automatically whenever you insert, change, or delete text.

Change bar applied to the left of revised text

Sometimes, you want to flag only important changes to your document rather than flag every change. If you’re sending out the second revision of a document for review, you probably want reviewers to focus on substantive changes. In these situations, you can select specific text to mark with change bars rather than add the change bars automatically.

You can remove the change bars from text later. For example, between drafts of a manual, you can remove the old change bars before adding new ones.

You can insert change bars in the newer of two versions of a document by comparing the versions.

note: Sometimes you add change bars to an entire paragraph of text and then update the paragraph format, for example, by importing formats from another document. Don’t remove format overrides during the update if you want to retain the change bars. Adding change bars to an entire paragraph alters the paragraph format, and the alteration counts as a format override.