Collaborate with MS Word Routing Slips 

You don't have to install anything. If you have MS Office 2000 and above, this feature would already be there on your machine. The situation is simply this-you are working on some files in one or more MS Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and need to send it to your boss and colleagues for comments or further modifications.

Traditionally, you would manually attach these files to your e-mail and then send them along. And then, you would need to track and version these files when they came back, as well as track who did what with them. However, did you know that all of this can be done by each office product without needing to install or configure anything? All you need is an MS Office product and an e-mail client-MS Outlook or Outlook Express, work best. Here we describe how to do this with MS Word and MS Outlook; the procedure is the same for other Office products as well.

Create your document, select File>Send To>Routing Recipient. Ensure that all intended recipients are there in your address book Select the recipients from your address book; enter subject and an introduction to the recipients. You can also control routing using the options at the bottom Add a new contact using the Advanced button at the bottom. Procedure is same as with the e-mail client Document is routed in the order listed. Protect comments, forms and turn on change-tracking Now from the menu, select File>Send To>Next Routing Recipient. You are asked if you want to send it along to the first recipient. Click on Yes to continue With Outlook 2003, you must select to allow MS Word to access it's features. Make your selection and click on Yes to continue With Outlook 2003, you must select to allow MS Word to access it's features. Make your selection and click on Yes to continue This is the mail as composed by MS Word in the previous step. Compress your attachment(s) here The recipients modify the file and send it on using the first option: 'Route document to...'   The document is returned after changes. We would have been notified if someone else got the document

Sujay V Sarma