Deleting All Comments

When writing and editing a document, it is not uncommon to add comments throughout the document. This is particularly true if you are writing a "team" document, where several people have responsibility for different parts of the document.

When you are through working on the document, you may want a way to get rid of all the comments at once. One easy way to do this is to follow these steps:

1. Make sure the Review tab of the ribbon is displayed.
2. Click the down-arrow next to or below (depending on which version of Word you are using) the Delete button in the Comments group. Word displays a drop-down list of options. (Even though the Delete button may look like it is not available, the down-arrow is active as long as there is one comment in the document.)
3. Choose the Delete All Comments in Document option.

Depending on how complex the comments are in your document, the above approach may not get rid of all the comments. This is particularly true if you have Track Changes turned on, and the document has gone through much iteration with lots of comments, some with Track Changes in place and some not. If you discover problems, or if you routinely have many, many comments to delete, you may want to consider creating a very short macro to get rid of comments. The following macro will delete all the comments in a document:

Sub RemoveComments2()
    ActiveDocument.DeleteAllComments
End Sub

The .DeleteAllComments method will delete all comments, including the newer threaded comments. Once deleted, the deletion cannot be undone.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11740) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Deleting All Comments.