Patent ID: 8375291

Claim:
A computer-implemented method comprising: displaying a document element in a document of a document preparation application; receiving, at a data annotation tool integrated with the document preparation application, one or more instructions resulting from user-input, an instruction specifying a tick mark symbol is to be associated with a document element within the document; associating the tick mark symbol with the document element within the document; associating automatically generated and user-supplied meta-data with the document element; responsive to receiving a request to display a document element subsequent to said associating the tick mark symbol with the document element, analyzing the document element to determine whether a value associated with the document element has chanced since the tick mark symbol was first associated with the document element; displaying the document element with the tick mark symbol if the value associated with document element has not changed since the tick mark symbol was first associated with the document element; and displaying the document element with an alternative tick mark symbol if the value associated with the document element has changed since the tick mark symbol was first associated with the document element.