Pop-up Comments

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated December 29, 2020)

If you work with Comments in your documents, you may really like this tip. Did you know that Word can automatically display a comment when you position the mouse over the comment marker in your document? For instance, if there is a comment marker such as [ALW1] in your document, and you position the mouse pointer over that marker, a small pop-up window appears and displays the contents of the comment.

If your version of Word does not do this, simply follow these steps to turn on the feature:

Choose Options from the Tools menu. Word displays the Options dialog box.
Make sure the View tab is selected. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The View tab of the Options dialog box

Make sure the ScreenTips check box is selected.
Click on OK.

Why Word refers to the pop-up comments as "ScreenTips" is beyond me. Normally, ScreenTips are a different feature, as described in the following tip.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (644) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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