Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated February 27, 2024)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
Ricky has a document that includes many comments. He wants to change one word that recurs in those comments. For example, in the phrase "bring to Joe's attention" he may want to change it to "bring to Mary's attention." Ricky wonders if there is a way to do this type of find and replace and affect only the comments.
Actually, this sort of task is quite easy to do in Word, and there are a couple of ways you can approach it. Here is one way to do it:
You can bypass the first step (the need to place the insertion point in the first comment) if you follow these alternative steps:
If you need to make these changes to a lot of documents—perhaps Joe has left the company and Mary is the new point person—then you may be interested in using a macro to make the changes. The following will do the trick for whatever document is active:
Sub MakeItMary() Dim c As Comment Dim sFind As String Dim sReplace As String sFind = "Joe" sReplace = "Mary" For Each c In ActiveDocument.Comments c.Range.Text = Replace(c.Range.Text, sFind, sReplace) Next End Sub
Note:
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (6200) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021.
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