Default Font for Comments

Phyllis has been using the Comments tab (on the Review tab of the ribbon) to correct student papers for her class. She wonders if there is a way to change the default font style and size for the comments.

As with many other formatting-related issues in Word, you can control how your comments appear based on built-in styles. Change the way the style is defined, and you change how your comments appear.

To change how the text in your comments are formatted, follow these steps:

1. Display the Home tab of the ribbon.
2. 2 Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Styles group. Word displays the Styles task pane.
3. Click Options at the bottom of the pane. Word displays the Style Pane Options dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Style Pane Options dialog box.

4. Using the Select Styles to Show drop-down list, choose All Styles.
5. Using the Select How List is Sorted drop-down list, choose Alphabetical.
6. Click OK to close the Style Pane Options dialog box.
7. Scroll through the list of styles until you see the Comment Text style.
8. Hover the mouse pointer over the style name, and then click on the down-arrow that appears at the right side of the style name. A drop-down menu appears.
9. Click on Modify. Word displays the Modify Style dialog box. (See Figure 2.)



Figure 2. The Modify Style dialog box for the Comment Text style.

10. Using the controls in the dialog box, specify how you want your comment text to appear.
11. Click on OK to close the Modify Style dialog box.

At this point, any comments in your document should reflect whatever formatting you specified in step 10—with one exception. If you changed the font size to something different (step 10), then that is not applied to the comments. Why Word ignores the font size is unknown, and quite frustrating. (It certainly won't solve all of Phyllis's desires.)

Some people report that you can modify the size of the font in the comments by using modifying the Balloon Text style. For instance, this YouTube video shows how to do exactly that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpwwquCOFFs&t=4s

The problem is that such approaches will only work in older versions of Word. It appears, in fact, that it will only work in versions that don't use the newer threaded comments. If you are using Word 2019, 2021, 2024, or Microsoft 365, then there appears to be no way to adjust the size of the comment text.

That being said, all the other attributes of your text can be changed as described in the steps above. There are, in reality, three different styles you may want to modify, following the steps already outlined. These styles control different elements of the comments:

• Comment Reference. This style controls how the comment is referenced and numbered in the main body of the document. Comment references (and thus this style) are only used if you are viewing your document in Draft view.
• Comment Subject. Since there is nothing called a "comment subject" that we could locate, you would think that this might change the font used to display the name of the person who inserted the comment. Nope; no change in that element. So, we can only conclude that this style is one not currently used in Word.
• Comment Text. This is the body of the actual comment, as already noted earlier in this tip.

When all is said and done, the shortest answer to Phyllis' question is to change the Comment Text style to reflect how you want the comments to appear, except for text size.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13590) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365.