Tracked changes are the standard mechanism for collaborative document editing in legal, corporate, and regulatory contexts. When a lawyer redlines a contract, they produce tracked changes that the counterparty reviews, accepting, rejecting, or commenting on each modification individually. This granular review process is fundamental to negotiation workflows: it preserves the full history of who changed what and when.
At the OOXML level, tracked changes are encoded as XML elements within `document.xml`: `<w:ins>` for insertions and `<w:del>` for deletions. Each revision element includes the author name (`w:author`), timestamp (`w:date`), and a unique revision ID (`w:id`). Formatting changes are tracked separately via `<w:rPrChange>` and `<w:pPrChange>` elements. Word renders these as colored text (insertions), strikethrough text (deletions), and margin annotations (formatting changes). The complexity of this XML structure is why most document automation tools avoid it entirely.
Most AI document tools cannot produce real tracked changes. They either generate plain text requiring manual comparison (copy-paste into Word, run Compare Documents), create PDF annotations (visual-only, not interactive, not acceptable in negotiation), or use proprietary diff formats that require special software the counterparty does not have. None of these approaches produce a .docx file that a lawyer can open in Word and review normally.
DocIQ Sphere produces actual OOXML tracked changes, indistinguishable from changes made in Microsoft Word itself. Every AI edit generates proper `<w:ins>` and `<w:del>` elements with author attribution and timestamps. The resulting .docx opens in Word with standard revision marks that any lawyer can review using Accept/Reject without installing additional software.