Comments are a useful tool when editing in Word, especially if more than one person is working on a document. There are several settings you will want to adjust to make Comments work well for you. The following articles discuss how to edit and view comments in Word to achieve communication concerning specific pieces of a document.

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

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

   Adding Comments to Your Document
If you would like to add non-printing notes to your document, the Comments feature is one way of doing that. Here's how to add them easily.

   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 Text in a Comment
Word has a very powerful find-and-replace capability, but it can be a bit persnickety when it comes to changing text within comments. This tip looks at how you can make those sorts of changes quickly and easily.

   Changing the User Name in Existing Comments
Want to change the name that Word associates with various comments previously added to your document? Here are some ideas you can apply.

   Comments in Headers and Footers
Comments can be a necessity when developing documents in conjunction with other people. They can be used to help document choices or to mark areas that need attention. You may find it odd, then, that Word doesn't allow you to add comments to headers or footers in the document. Here's a way around this shortcoming.

   Comments in Text Boxes
If you use text boxes in your documents, you may sometime want to place a comment in the text box, the same as you can do with text not in the text box. Word doesn't allow you to add comments to text boxes, but there are a couple of workarounds you can use to get the same result.

   Comments Only Visible When Hovering Over a Word or Phrase
The comment feature of Word allows you to easily attach comments to words or phrases in your document. How those comments appear can be controlled through the judicious use of a couple of settings.

   Comments Use Tiny Font when Printed
When you print out your documents, do any comments in the document appear very tiny on the printout? It could be because of the way you have those comments formatted. This tip explains the ins and outs of comment formatting and how it affects printouts.

   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.

   Converting Text to Comments
One of the strong suits of macros is that they can process the information in a document quickly and reliably. For instance, if you have text that uses a reliable pattern, you can find that text and convert it to some other use in a document, such as comments. This tip shows you how.

   Copying, Moving, and Deleting Notes and Comments
Comments or notes are often added to documents to aid in their development. You can use regular editing techniques to copy, move, and delete those comments and notes.

   Counting Words in Comments
Word makes it easy to calculate the number of words in a document. If you want to count words only in your comments, then you will want to use a macro to get the desired statistic.

   Default Font for Comments
Want your comments to stand out a bit more than normal or, to the contrary, to be minimized? You can affect how comments look by modifying the various styles associated with those comments.

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

   Deleting Commented Text
Word allows you to add comments to your document to aid in the development of the document. At some point you may want to selectively delete comments and the text to which they refer. Here is one quick way to do it.

   Displaying Document 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.

   Displaying Highlights for Commented Text
Word provides quite a bit of flexibility in what markup is displayed on-screen and how that markup appears. This tip looks at how you can get your comments to appear exactly as you want.

   Formatting Comments
Need to change the appearance of the text in your comments? It's easy to do using techniques you are already familiar with.

   Getting a Warning for Markup
Many people, when collaborating on a document with others, use the Track Changes feature to show the effects of their editing. When printing your document, you may not want Word to include these changes in the printout. You can instruct the program to warn you if you try to print and there are any tracked changes or comments in the document.

   Getting Rid of "Comment" in Comments
When you add a comment to a document, Word presents that comment in a very specific way. If you want to change the way in which the comment is displayed, you are, unfortunately, out of luck.

   Hiding Individual Comments
When developing a document, a common practice is to use comments to discuss changes with other people or to make notes about the development process. If you use comments in this manner, you may long for a way to hide individual comments so only those requiring your attention are left visible. This tip discusses different approaches you can take to this need.

   Inserting Initials and Date in a Comment
When you insert a comment into a document, Word keeps track of who entered it and the date when it was entered. Here's how to add that creation date permanently to the comment's text.

   Inserting Notes
Microsoft now calls "notes" what it used to call "comments." Some people don't like the modern, threaded notes. This tip looks at how you can, perhaps, turn off modern comments and concludes, unfortunately, that there is no way to simply insert a traditional note.

   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.

   Moving Text to a New Footnote
For certain types of work, footnotes are a necessity. Word provides an easy way to create new footnotes, but what about easily moving existing text from the document into a footnote? This tip provides a great way to do this task.

   Numbering Comments
When editing a document written by others, it is not uncommon to add comments throughout the text. To reference these comments, you may want to use a numbering scheme of some type. Here is a quick discussion about various approaches to such a need.

   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.

   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.

   Printing Comments from a Macro
Need to print the comments you've added to a document? You can do it manually or you can have your macro do the printing. This tip examines how to make the macro do the work.

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

   Struggling with New Changes to Track Changes
In the latest versions of Microsoft 365, the company has introduced an entirely new way to deal with markup comments. This change is frustrating to many people who wonder if there is a way to handle comments as they have historically been handled in Word.

   Turning Off the Date and Time Shown in a Comment
When you add a comment to a document, Word helpfully includes the date and time that the comment was added. If you don't want the date and time displayed, Word doesn't give you much latitude. This tip looks at one possible approach.

   Useable Printed Pages with Markup
When you create documents that rely on markup (tracked changes and comments), getting usable printed output that includes the markup can be challenging. This tip looks at some ideas that can help you get what you need.

   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's how to do it.

   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.