Word – How to change the colors used in MS Word 2007 track changes

It is possible to do this in the new XML-based .docx format used by Word 2007. A .docx file is actually a ZIP file containing the different components of the document, which you can gain access to by renaming the file from filename.docx to filename.zip.

To change the author of tracked changes, open the file word\document.xml in a text editor. The author of each insertion and deletion is specified by the w:author attribute of the corresponding <w:ins> or <w:del> element. Change it to whatever you want, save the file back to the ZIP archive, and rename the file back to filename.docx.

Comments work the same way, except that they're stored in the file word\comments.xml, in <w:comment> elements. You must change the values of both the w:author and w:initials attributes for each comment, or you may get unexpected results.

Understand that doing this is probably a bad idea. The spec suggests that changing the authors of revisions and comments shouldn't cause trouble with other parts of the document, but who knows whether that's true in all cases, and in any event it's pretty easy to make mistakes with these kinds of changes unless you're just doing simple global search/replace operations. If you still want to take the risk, be sure to create backups of everything first.

Simple

Add your text box.

On the developer tab, select "Design mode"

Don't just leave the text selected, click ESC then reselect across the prompt text (select everything between the strange box bracket things)

Overtype the text with your chosen prompt

Close design mode

An extra tip: if you open the styles pane and change the options to make sure you can see all styles, you can change the look of the "placeholder text" style - I usually do this to something pretty harsh like bold and dark red, to make sure that these bits stand out until someone fills them in.

2nd extra tip: you can change the properties of the content control as well, such as adding a title (which survives after the prompt text has been overtyped), and setting things such as that the control cannot be deleted (for mandatory fields), or that the control is removed and replaced by the text once typed on (to make a cleaner finished document). To get at properties, select the control by its frame and click "properties" on the developer ribbon.