Marking changes and sending versions — a guide for planners
This replaces two things you currently do by hand in Word: turning text red until it’s confirmed, and turning it green to show the hotel what’s moved since the last file you sent them.
1. Red: your unconfirmed mark
Click into any block of text and use the ● button on the editor toolbar to mark the line you’re on. Select several lines first and it marks all of them.
A red line means “I haven’t confirmed this yet.” It’s your judgement, so nothing sets it but you.
Red shows on screen, in the print document, and in the Word file. It is not hidden from vendors — if you’d rather clear it before a file goes out, clear it before you export.
Copying a red line. Triple-click to select the whole line before copying and the red comes with it. Select only part of a line and you’ll copy plain text — which is usually what you want, since half a red sentence isn’t a state anyone can act on.
2. Green: what changed since your last version
You don’t mark green. The system works it out.
Every time you tick Record as the next version, it takes a snapshot of every line in your agenda and resume, as they stand at that moment. Next time you export, anything that no longer matches gets marked:
- Green with a line down the side — new or reworded since that version.
- Struck through in grey, under Removed since AV3 — a line you deleted. The wording is kept, so the hotel can see what went, not just that something did.
- “Time changed since AV3” under a function’s heading — the day or time moved. Times don’t sit in a text block, so they’re called out in words.
- The title page says how many changes there are, so someone knows how many to look for.
3. Working copies versus versions
This is the part worth getting right.
| Working copy | Record as the next version | |
|---|---|---|
| Shows changes | Yes | Yes |
| Resets the baseline | No | Yes |
| Filename | …-agenda-resume-… | …-v12-av3-rv1-… |
Export as many working copies as you like — print one for yourself, check how something reads, show a colleague. Changes keep accumulating until you actually cut a version.
The moment you tick the box, the current state becomes the new starting point. Everything green goes black on the next export, because it’s now the version the recipient has.
The filename tells you which you’re holding. If it has a
vnumber it’s an official version. If it saysagenda-resume, it’s a working copy — don’t let one of those get mistaken for the file you sent.
4. Why the agenda and the resume have separate numbers
AV is the agenda’s version. RV is the resume’s. The V at the front is the export number.
us-field-medical-meeting-v12-av3-rv1-2026-08-28.docx
They’re separate because you don’t always send both. If you export the agenda five times while editing the resume, the resume’s changes wait — they’re still green, still pending — and land in full the next time the resume is actually included. That way you never send a resume with nothing flagged because a version you cut for the agenda quietly counted them.
The order looks like this:
| Export | File | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | v1-av1-rv1 | Both sent. Nothing marked — first version of each. |
| 2 | v2-av2 | Agenda only. Resume edits still pending. |
| 3 | v3-av3 | Agenda only, still pending. |
| 4 | v4-av4-rv2 | Resume included at last — all its changes show here. |
5. Things to watch out for
Green resets when you record. If you record a version to “see what it looks like”, you’ve consumed those marks. Use a working copy to look.
Filtering the page doesn’t filter the file. If you’ve filtered the agenda to one day, or the resume to one section, the export still contains everything — a version has to describe the whole project. What you see on screen is a reading aid, not the shape of the document.
A moved line shows twice. Move a bullet from Setup to AV and you’ll see it struck through in Setup and green in AV. That’s deliberate: where a line sits is operational, and a move that showed nothing at all would be worse.
Rewording a line reads as new. There’s no way for the system to tell a small edit from a fresh line, so a corrected typo marks the same as a new instruction.
Early on, most things will be green. In the first weeks nearly everything changes between versions, so the marks are least useful exactly then. They earn their keep close to the event, when changes are few and each one matters.
Archiving a whole function or item puts its removed lines at the end of the document rather than in place — there’s no longer a section for them to sit under.
6. What isn’t built yet
- Sending to a named vendor. Versions are per project, not per recipient. If the hotel and the AV company get different files, both are measured against the same last version.
- Marking part of a line. Green works line by line. If you need to point at three words inside a sentence, that’s still a manual job.
- A history panel. You can’t yet browse what a past version contained. The record of what was sent and when exists; there’s just no screen for it.