How to Use Suggesting Mode in Google Docs

Switching from Editing mode to Suggesting mode — via the mode dropdown near the top-right of the document (usually showing a pencil icon labeled "Editing") or the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Shift+X (Cmd+Option+Shift+X on Mac) — changes how every subsequent edit to the document is recorded, turning direct changes into attributed, reviewable proposals instead. **What changes once Suggesting mode is active**: typing new text, deleting existing text, or applying formatting no longer modifies the document directly. Instead, each change appears as colored markup — additions typically underlined in a color assigned to that specific collaborator, deletions shown with strikethrough rather than actually disappearing — alongside a small comment-like bubble in the margin identifying who made the suggestion and when. **Why this matters for collaborative review**: Suggesting mode preserves a clear, attributable record of exactly what each reviewer proposed, which the document's owner or an editor with sufficient permission can then accept or reject individually, one suggestion at a time, or in bulk. This is meaningfully different from simply editing directly, which would silently overwrite the original text with no record of what changed or who changed it, and is functionally equivalent in purpose to Microsoft Word's Track Changes feature, though the interaction details and terminology differ. **Accepting and rejecting suggestions**: hovering over or clicking a specific suggestion reveals small checkmark and X icons for accepting or rejecting that individual change, and the toolbar also offers an option to accept or reject every suggestion in the document at once — useful once a document owner has reviewed everything and is ready to finalize a batch of accumulated feedback rather than clicking through each one individually. **How this differs from adding a comment**: a comment (Ctrl+Alt+M) attaches a note about the text without proposing any actual change to it — useful for asking a question or making an observation. A suggestion, by contrast, is an actual proposed edit to the content itself, shown inline as colored markup rather than sitting in the margin as a separate note. The two are frequently used together: a suggested edit accompanied by a comment explaining the reasoning behind it. **Related shortcuts**: Ctrl+Alt+M inserts a comment independently of Suggesting mode; Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H opens Version History, which is the appropriate tool for reviewing a document's full edit history over time rather than the currently pending, unresolved suggestions specifically. **Alternative methods**: clicking directly on the mode dropdown and selecting Suggesting from the list achieves the identical result as the keyboard shortcut, and is generally the more discoverable route for anyone who hasn't specifically learned the shortcut, since the dropdown is a persistent, visible element near the top of every document. **Mistake to avoid**: forgetting to switch back to Editing mode after finishing a review pass, then wondering why subsequent direct changes are showing up as colored suggestions rather than applying immediately — checking the mode dropdown first, before assuming something is broken, resolves this quickly, since the mode simply persists until deliberately switched back. **A note on permission levels**: whether a specific collaborator sees Suggesting mode as an option at all depends on the access level granted to them on that document — someone with full Editor access can freely switch between Editing and Suggesting as they choose, while someone granted only Commenter access is generally locked into a Suggesting-equivalent mode by default and can't make direct edits regardless of which mode they select, since their underlying permission simply doesn't allow it. **Why teams standardize on this for review passes**: compared to emailing a document back and forth with each round of feedback embedded in message text, or manually tracking verbal feedback from a call, Suggesting mode keeps every proposed change directly attached to the exact text it affects, attributed to whoever proposed it, and reviewable in context — which is a large part of why it's become the default expectation for collaborative review in any team that has standardized on Google Workspace for shared documents.