FRAGILE: Opening Your Edited Manuscript

Editing and Writing, Industry Advice, Production and Publishing

Opening a Microsoft Word file that has been edited using MS Word’s track changes feature in Google Docs or Apple Pages can significantly disrupt and corrupt the formatting and advanced features due to fundamental differences between the programs.

Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Apple Pages each use different underlying technologies for rendering and formatting documents. Microsoft Word, which has been the publishing industry’s standard word processing software for decades and, as such, is widely preferred by industry professionals in both traditional and assisted publishing, uses a precise, fixed-layout model tied to local printer drivers.

An author taking the leap into book publishing should acquire and familiarize themselves MS Word so they can appropriately prepare their document for editing and navigate the edited document that is returned to them.

Google Docs uses a fluid, web-based rendering engine, which means Office Compatibility Mode is limited, so Docs warns you before you use it to open a Word file that you may lose many of the formatting features Word provides.

Apple Pages uses a proprietary document model to which any Word file opened in Pages will be automatically converted when it’s imported. 

This fundamental difference means neither Pages nor Docs can perfectly handle complex Word features, such as tracked changes, resulting in corruption and damage to the edited file. Unaddressed, this corruption can lead to further technical problems down the book-publishing line, including in design and typesetting. Incidentally, a manuscript should not be designed in MS Word for printing because it is not a design and typesetting program (see this post for more).

Docs and Apple Pages may work fine for an author in the drafting stage, but any file that will be submitted to professional editor will be revised in MS Word and should only be revised in that program until it is submitted to the book designer/typesetting. Remember: simply opening the edited document in one of those programs will cause issues, so please don’t do it.