Enjoying getting back to work after the holidays? As you look through your prioritized list of tasks, they will inevitably include the dreaded “Please review changes to my document and provide feedback”. You consider the
number of pages in that doc when you last saw it and groan. It goes towards the bottom of your list. Too big a task to get done quickly. And you have 5 of these to do.
What if a new type of process could save me time and break that inertia? A simple set of 4 steps that gets me completely up to date on what I missed without the burden of scanning the whole document again?
1 – Tell me that I’m up to date and what document changed. Rather than searching email for updated attachments or links, I can see what documents have changed recently and get a quick overview of their extent. Documents with a green checkmark corner banner tell me that I am looking at the most recent version. The blue badge on the top right tells me that I have never opened this version and number (6) number of changes since the prior version. And the eyeglasses tell me the version that I last read. In a glance, we can see that for ABC Audit Report 2 versions have been published since I last read it (versions 3 and 4) and that there are 6 changes in version 4. Since that doesn’t sound too onerous, I’m comfortable proceeding to see what’s changed and reacting to it.
2 – Tell me what’s changed in the document since I last read it. In the document view, I tap on the ‘delta’ button with the number beside it on the bottom toolbar. In the popover I see that the last version I read was version 2, as indicated by the eyeglasses again. Now I can compare changes directly between the most recent version 4 and my last read version 2 by selecting Version 2 in the Compare popover.
3 – See the changes. After selecting version 2 to compare to, I now see that the ‘delta’ indicator has changed to version 2, indicating that all my change comparisons are relative to version 2. I also see that there are 10 changes (bottom center) instead of the 6 changes indicated when I was comparing version 4 to version 3. I now have the proper context set up for navigating to changed content since I last read the document.
I can get to these changes in a couple of ways. Tapping on the bottom right button brings up changed pages thumbnails. I immediately see the scope of changes per page – I can then navigate to where most change has been concentrated or I can navigate to pages where I last provided feedback on content to see if the author has included my suggestions. I tap on a thumbnail to navigate to the page.
Another way to see the list of changes is via the list or strips view. I tap on the 3 bars on the bottom right, and that brings up the strips view. In this view I get a piece of document context around each change as well as indication of the prior content just below each strip. From here I can also navigate to any change with a single tap.
4 – Navigate to, see and react to each change. I tap on a change and it brings me to the appropriate page and opens the change so that I can immediately see what the prior content was. From here I can react – post notes back to the author or all the document recipients and engage in a social work interaction around the document and changes.
Four simple steps gets me completely up to date on document work that continued in my absence. To see the steps in action, take a look at our iPad overview video. Enjoy!
