Comments and Annotations

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Comments and Annotations' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Adding Comments to Your Document
Commenting is a great tool that allows you to add remarks or notes at various places in your document. Exactly how you add comments depends on the version of Word you are using, as described in this tip.

Allowing Only Comments in a Document
Develop a document that is to be reviewed by a group of people, and you may want to protect it in some way. One way you can protect it is to make sure that people can only add comments to the document and not make changes to the text. Here's how to do this trick.

Changing Comment Bubble Colors
Want to change the color that Word uses for comments in your document? The extent of what you can change depends largely on your version of Word.

Changing the Language of Comment Boxes
In most instances Word makes it relatively easy to change the language associated with your document text. This is important when it comes to applying certain tools, such as the spell checker and grammar checker. Even so, it is not always evident where the language changes should be made. A case in point is in comment boxes, as discussed in this tip.

Comment Dates Updated Inappropriately
Using the comment capabilities of Word is a common occurrence when developing a document. What do you do, however, if the dates associated with the comments periodically change?

Comments in Endnotes
Able to add comments everywhere, except in endnotes? This seems to be a limitation in Word, but here's some ways to work around the problem.

Converting Paragraphs to Comments
Want to pull text from a bunch of paragraphs and stuff that text into comments? It's easy to do using the macro presented in this tip.

Copying, Moving and Deleting Comments
Comments are handy when you are developing a document. Copying, moving, and deleting the comments is relatively easy; all you need to do is use the editing techniques you are already using.

Deleting All Comments
Got comments in your document? Want to get rid of them all? The easiest way to do so is going to depend on the version of Word you are using and the complexity of the document you are editing.

Formatting Comments
The text within comments can be formatted using the same techniques used to format regular document text. In addition, you can modify the style on which comments are based in order to completely control how comments look. This tip explains how to get the formatting you want.

Jumping To a Comment
Got a document with lots of comments in it? You can navigate from comment to comment with ease by using the Go To tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.

Making Sure Changes and Comments are Anonymous
When using Track Changes, Word normally notes the originator of a particular comment or change. This information can then be displayed so that other readers can know who did what. If you want comments and changes to be anonymous, then there are a couple of things you can do, as described in this tip.

Pasting a Comment into Your Document
When developing a document, you may end up with all sorts of comments that you need to deal with. One common task is to copy text from the comment into the body of the document. Here's how to accomplish the task.

Pop-up Comments
Want to see what a comment says just by moving the mouse? Here's how.

Printing Comments
Comments are a great way to share, well, comments with other people looking through your documents. If you want to print just a list of your document comments, you may be out of luck—unless you use the ideas presented in this tip.

Removing All Comments
Need to get rid of all the comments in your document? You can do so by using the regular Find and Replace feature of Word.

Searching for Comment Marks
Got a bunch of comments in your document? You can easily jump from one comment to the other by using the Object Browser, as described in this tip.

Turning Off Comment Color when Printing
Comments that you add to your document are most often displayed in a bright color so they aren't easily missed. If you want to turn off those colors when printing the comments, you'll want to note the information in this tip.

Using Multiple References to a Single Comment
Find yourself repeating the same comment over and over? Here's a couple of ways you can save some typing by simply referring to the first instance of the comment you repeat.

Viewing Comments
Adding comments to a document is a normal activity when writing and editing. Once comments have been added, you may wonder about the best way to view those comments. Here are the various ways you can display them.

Viewing Comments From a Specific Reviewer
If you have multiple editors (or authors) working on the same document, and each of them is adding comments, you may want to view only the comments made by a subset of those editors. This can be easily done, but the steps you follow depend on the version of Word you are using.