Printing Just the Changes and Comments

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated November 21, 2023)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021


Lorraine produces numerous large documents (several hundreds of pages long) in her company. These are circulated internally for review, with everyone using Track Changes and inserting comments. Lorraine wonders if there is a way to print just the pages with corrections and/or comments, as she likes to have a printed version of any comments received.

There is no direct way to only print pages that have changes or comments on them. There is a workaround that you may find helpful, however. Follow these steps:

  1. Press Ctrl+P. Word displays your printing settings.
  2. Under the Settings heading is a drop-down list that is set, by default, to Print All Pages. (This is the very first drop-down list under the Settings heading.)
  3. Using this drop-down list, choose List of Markup.
  4. Click the Print button.

What you end up with is a printout of the various pages in your document that have markup (comments or changes) on them. Note that this is simply a list of pages; it is not the actual pages. Now you can choose to print out those pages:

  1. Press Ctrl+P. Word displays your printing settings.
  2. Under the Settings heading is a drop-down list that is set, by default, to Print All Pages. (This is the very first drop-down list under the Settings heading.)
  3. Using this drop-down list, choose Custom Print. Word makes the Pages control available.
  4. In the Pages control, enter the page numbers that include the markup you want printed. (These are the page numbers that were generated just a moment ago.) Separate each page number by a comma, as in 3, 5, 12. If you have a contiguous range of pages you want printed, you can also specify the range, as in 3, 6, 12, 15-19, 27.
  5. Click the Print button.

This may seem a bit clunky, but it is unfortunately the best that can be done natively within Word. If you have a common need to print pages that just include changes, you might consider an add-in to handle this for you. One suggested by some readers is this DocTools add-in:

https://wordaddins.com/products/extract-tracked-changes-and-comments/

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13586) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021.

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. ...

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