Microsoft Word has a built-in commenting system that allows you to add your own comments to documents. You can use the Comments button on the document’s toolbar to add your own comments, or you can use the Commenting Tools window to manage all of your comments. To comment on a document in Microsoft Word, follow these steps:
- Open the document.
- On the document’s toolbar, click the Comments button.
- In the Commenting Tools window, click the Add Comment button.
- Type your comment into the text field and click OK.
- Click the Save Changes button to close the Commenting Tools window and finish editing the document.
Comments in Word allow you to provide feedback in a document without changing the text or layout. You can place the cursor in the content or select content (text, images, tables, etc.) and add a comment about that part of the document.
When you add a comment to some text in a document and then click away, you may notice that there is no line connecting the comment to the text it corresponds to (as shown on the image below), until you move your mouse over the comment or put the cursor in, or select that text, again. If you want to be able to see at a glance which comments correspond to which text, without having to hover your mouse over each comment, you can easily add the lines back to the comments.
There are different views for comments. In the Simple Markup view, there is no line from the text to the comment until you hover over the comment or select, or put the cursor in, the text associated with it. The All Markup view shows all the lines to the comments all the time, whether the comment or the associated text is selected or not. So, to see all the lines to the comments, you can switch to the All Markup view. Here’s how.
Start by clicking the “Review” tab.
In the Tracking section of the Review tab, click the Display for Review drop-down list at the top of the section and select the “All Markup” option.
If you don’t see the drop-down list, you may need to widen the Word window. Or, you can click on the “Tracking” button to access the options in the Tracking section.
Once you’ve selected All Markup, you will immediately see a line connecting each comment to its corresponding text.
If you have a lot of comments in your document, the All Markup view may be a bit confusing. You may want to go back to the Simple Markup view and hover over each comment to see which text it’s connected to.
Changing the markup view in one document applies to all other documents you open after that.
