Inline Comments - Word 2007

[John Fenton]

I need to be able to create comments that will print inline completely and
not just my initials. I cannot find anything in the options or the help
files that tell me how to do this. Currently, the only way to actually
print the comments is as balloons off to the side and I need them inline.

Thanks for your help and time!

John

 

[Jay Freedman]

I need to be able to create comments that will print inline completely and
not just my initials. I cannot find anything in the options or the help
files that tell me how to do this. Currently, the only way to actually
print the comments is as balloons off to the side and I need them inline.

Thanks for your help and time!

John

For this requirement, you can't use Words built-in Comments feature -- it just
doesn't work that way.

Define a character style, including some formatting (color, background, etc.)
that will distinguish it from regular text. To make an "inline comment", just
type the comment in place and then apply the character style to it (you can
define a keyboard shortcut or toolbar button to apply the style). If you want to
include your initials, a time stamp, or anything else, you'll have to type that
as well.

If this is something you expect to do a lot, a macro could make it a one-click
operation.

 

[John Fenton]

Thanks Jay.

It is very unfortunate that MS has decided that what once was the standard
behavior is now no longer even possible. There are many good reasons to
still allow the inline comment to show the entire comment WHEN you need a
commented document and not show at all for the official document. The way
comments print now forces your entire document to become microscopic when
printed in order to cram the big stupid balloons onto the page.

For a company that believes in providing as many was as possible to do the
same thing, this is one they missed the boat on and forces the end user to
have to become a scripter just to get everyday work done. My end users
don't want to become programmers, they just want to be able to get their
work done.

For anyone interested in a solution albeit kludgy and unfortunate, we are
using the hidden text feature available in the FONT properties.

I'm not a programmer by trade but if anyone can give me a few clues where to
start in reprogramming the COMMENT feature of Word 2007, I'll take a shot at
fixing Word so it's not locked down like a cell phone.

Jay, if you have any contacts, please pass the word back to MS that inline
comments need to have some options added back in apparently removed by the
formatting police.

Thank you again for confirming what I suspected.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Did Word ever display *comments* inline? I thought they were always
displayed only in ScreenTips and the Comments pane.

 

[Jay Freedman]

I don't use comments extensively, so my memory on this point is a bit hazy,
but I don't remember the built-in Insert > Comment feature of any version of
Word since before Office 2000 that supported in-line comments.

Do you know that you can set the width of the column for the balloons? It's
at the bottom of the Track Changes Options dialog (click the down arrow on
the Track Changes button and select Change Tracking Options). If the
comments are short, you could set the balloon width to 1" or 1.5".

If you want to use the Hidden font attribute instead, it would be quicker to
use if you define a character style consisting of Default Paragraph Font +
Hidden and put that on the Quick Styles gallery and/or assign a keyboard
shortcut to it.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[John Fenton]

Suzanne,

I'm not sure where I saw it last week while searching to see if Word offered
this capability and I read (somewhere on MS website in the office section,
maybe) that the thinking was that entire inline comments disrupted the flow
of the thought process involved in the document so MS made the inline
comments available as a popup bubble when hovered or as a side balloon.
Unfortunately, as I said, there are some very good reasons for showing the
entire comment inline but we don't get that option with Word. I'm not sure
that Word ever offered it but many other word processors do.

Jay,

Thanks for the tips. By default Ctrl Shft H gives you hidden text.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

That may have been a reference to insertions/deletions rather than comments.
In fact, what we were told about the balloons, however, was that publishing
companies asked for a markup method that would not distort the page (which
could contain carefully placed graphic elements); pulling deletions (or
insertions, depending on view) out into the margin met this need (and was
more like what users were used to seeing from copy editors).