The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
Working with Comments in Word
 Manipulating the Comment Reference Mark Labels: Part 1
Brett Lockwood

 


Brett Lockwood explains the use of the Word “comments” feature, and discusses how customising comment reference mark labels can make the writing process faster — streamlining communication between people contributing to a document.
 
The comment feature in Word is a valuable means of rapidly inserting "working notes" into a document. It is not a complicated activity, and the feature is being increasingly used as people discover its value. You can create comments to provide notes to yourself, but comments are often utilised when two or more people are using a document and want to provide information about it - particularly queries - to each other without altering the actual document contents.

The mechanics of Word comments are the same as those of footnotes and endnotes. When you create a comment, a comment reference mark is inserted into the document and given a unique identifying number, and the comment pane opens in the lower section of the Word screen to let you enter the comment text. 		  The procedures in this article have been checked for versions of Word up to and including Word 2000 (PC) and Word 2001 (Mac). In Word 6, comments are called "annotations". Also, there may be minor differences depending on the status of your Microsoft Office Service Packs.
 		  

To read or edit an existing comment, you can double click the relevant comment reference mark in the document text. When you do this, the comment pane opens and the comment text is displayed. When you delete a comment (you can do this by selecting the comment reference mark with the mouse and pressing the Delete key), any other comments are automatically renumbered. In addition, you can print comments by themselves, or as part of the document.

Reference Mark Construction

You insert a comment by clicking the cursor into the document at the desired location and using the menu sequence of Insert|Comment (some things are what they seem). The comment reference mark is placed in the document text to identify the comment location. (If you are not seeing comment reference marks when you insert comments, click the Show/Hide button on the standard toolbar - see Figure 4). This mark consists of square brackets containing the comment "ID" number. It also includes other information. If you use Word on a home/small office computer rather than an organisation network, you might wonder why this other information looks like your name initials.

Let's examine this a bit closer, because it opens up the possibility of manipulating comment reference mark labels in a very useful way.

User Information Tab

The text source for comment reference marks is the User Information tab. When Word is installed on a computer, the information entered to identify the user is automatically placed in both the Name and Initials text boxes in the User Information tab of the Options dialog box. Figure 1 shows the User Information tab for my PC. You access this tab using Tools| Options, and clicking User Information (Tools|Preferences, User Information tab for Word 98 Mac; Edit|Preferences, User Information tab for Word 2001 Mac).

When you insert a comment into a document, the contents of the User Information tab Initials box are used as part of the comment reference mark. This identifies the owner of the comment. Also, the colour yellow is used as an identification aid. Figure 2 shows some text containing comment reference marks produced by the labels in Figure 1.



Figure 1. Options dialog box, User Information tab.
The contents of the Name text box are automatically copied from
the details entered when Word is installed. The contents of the
Initials text box are automatically created from the Name box contents.

Utilising Text Background

When a comment is inserted by clicking into document text and using Insert|Comment, the comment reference mark and the word immediately to the left of the mark are given a yellow background as a visual aid.

You can exploit this colouring feature to precisely identify the document text to which the comment refers. You do this by selecting with the mouse the document text you want to "comment" on and then using Insert| Comment. In Figure 2, the first two comments have been inserted using the standard click into text method. The third and fourth comments have been inserted using the text selection method.



Figure 2. Comment reference mark labels are constructed by combining the
contents of the User Information tab initials
(see Figure 1) and an automatically allocated "ID" number

Note: If you do not see yellow back-grounding when you insert a comment, the ScreenTips option is turned off in the View tab of the Options dialog box. Turn it on using Tools|Options, View tab (Tools| Preferences, View tab for Word 98 Mac; Edit|Preferences, View tab for Word 2001 Mac). See the "Show" options section of Figure 3.

Control Viewing of Comments

Controlling the viewing of comment reference marks is achieved through the View tab settings. Comment reference marks are formatted in Word as hidden text, and the formatting mark for hidden text is a dotted underline. If you look at Figure 2 you will see these dotted lines under the comment reference marks. So, if you want to always see your comment reference marks, ensure that the hidden text option in the View tab of the Options dialog box (Tools|Options, View tab (PC)) is turned on. On the other hand, if you want to set comment reference marks so that you can choose to view or not view them without having to use menu sequences, go to the View tab of the Options box, turn off the hidden text option, and the other options under the Formatting marks section (Word 2000) (this section is labelled Nonprinting characters in Word 97) of the View tab, and turn on the All option in this section (see the Formatting marks section of Figure 3). This enables you to display or hide all these components (tabs, spaces, hidden text etc.) as a group by clicking the Show/Hide button on the standard toolbar (Figure 4). This is often the preferred method of people who work a lot with comments.



Figure 4. The Show/Hide button on the standard toolbar is represented by the paragraph mark symbol (¶). This button turns formatting marks on and off for viewing according to the options set in the “Formatting marks” section (Word 2000) or “Nonprinting characters” section (Word 97) of the Options dialog box, View tab. If you are not

Figure 3 (at left). Options dialog box, View tab (Word 2000). The “Formatting marks” section of this tab is where you determine whether you want constant viewing of comment reference marks, or whether you want comment marks to be turned on and off for viewing via the standard toolbar Show/Hide button. This section of the View tab is called “Nonprinting characters” in Word 97.

An alternative is to turn on both the hidden text and All options on the View tab, and have tabs, spaces, paragraph marks and optional hyphens turned off. This will mean that comment reference marks are always viewed, but that these other document elements are toggled on and off (as a group) by clicking the Show/Hide button.

In fact, use of the Show/Hide button toggles the All setting in the View tab of the Options dialog box. If the All setting in the View tab is turned on, and you click the Show/Hide button to turn off formatting characters for viewing, the All setting will be turned off. So, don't get confused if you turn the All option on, then click the Show/Hide button and go to the View tab to find that the All option has been turned off. What you are seeing is just a toggle function.

Note: Several Options dialog box settings are not available unless you are in Normal view. Remember to change to Normal view before you open this box. It can get very confusing if you open the Options box in, say, Page Layout view and don't see options that you have seen before. All the Options box settings are available in Normal view.

Does this make sense? If not, change these View tab settings a couple of times, insert a couple of comments, click the Show/Hide button on the standard toolbar, and you'll pick it up. To show you what is seen when comment reference marks are turned off for viewing, Figure 5 presents the text in Figure 2 with hidden text turned off.



Figure 5. When you turn comment reference marks off for viewing, the yellow back-grounding remains to show the position of comments.

The yellow backgrounding remains to indicate the presence of a comment. Turning comment marks off for viewing can be useful if you find they get in the way of reading text, or if page layout is important to you and you don't want the space occupied by the marks to interfere with it.

Manipulating Tab Labels

The really useful aspect of the Options dialog box User Information tab text boxes is that you can manipulate the text box contents to control comment reference mark labelling. This lets you clearly identify comments from various users of a document. In my on-screen editing training, I use the examples of an editor label and an author label. In the Name text box I use From editor for one category of comments, and From author for a second category of comments. Correspondingly, in the Initials text box I use "ED" to signify editor for the first category of comments, and "AU" to signify author for the second category of comments. This means that two categories of labels are produced. Of course, you can use any labels you like (though the label "Hey, stupid!" is unlikely to make you friends), and you can use more than two categories of labels. Let's run through this.


Figure 6. The first set of labels entered into the User
Information text boxes.


Figure 7. The second set of labels entered into the User Information text boxes.

Keying in the first set of labels

  1. Open the document you want to use.
  2. Use Tools|Options, User Information tab (PC).
  3. Replace the contents of the Name box with "From editor".
  4. Replace the contents of the Initials box with "ED" (Figure 6).
  5. 5 Insert some comments into the document.
Keying the second set of labels
  1. Use Tools|Options, User Information tab again.
  2. Replace the contents of the Name box with "From author".
  3. Replace the contents of the Initials text box with "AU" (Figure 7).
  4. Insert some more comments into the document.
Note: The User Information tab contents are global settings in Word. Changes you make to these labels will apply to every document you work with after changing these settings. Changes are not applied retrospectively, either to comments in the active document or to comments in other existing documents.

Seeing the Results

Figure 8 shows the result of changing the reference mark labels, outlined above. Some hypothetical editor-author comments in the form of questions from the editor to the author and from the author to the editor, and replies to these questions, are included. The Word comment pane has been opened by double clicking on one of the comment reference marks in the document text (upper section). Four comments are shown, numbered 1 to 4.



Figure 8. Viewing two sets of comment reference mark labels with the comment pane open and
the ScreenTips hypertext box in use.

You can see how useful this reference mark label manipulation process can be in clearly identifying comments from different people in the document writing process. In addition, in Figure 8 the cursor has been held stationary over the first comment, resulting in the viewing of the ScreenTips hypertext box containing the comment text, a great feature that makes it easy to read comments. Also, you can see that the text in the ScreenTips box is prefixed with From editor. The ScreenTips box uses the label in the Name box of the User Information tab (Options dialog box) as a header for the comment text. So you don't need the comment pane open to read comments or clearly identify their owner. You don't even need your comment reference marks turned on for viewing to do this. You can do it just by using the mouse.

Note: If the ScreenTips hypertext box does not appear when you hold the cursor stationary over a comment mark, the ScreenTips option is turned off in the View tab of the Options dialog box. Turn it on using Tools|Options, View tab (Tools| Preferences, View tab for Word 98 Mac; Edit|Preferences, View tab for Word 2001 Mac). See the Show section of Figure 3.

Feedback on this article is welcome.

Part 2 of this article will deal with filtering categories of comments for viewing and searching purposes, searching for comments, printing comments, using the Reviewing toolbar to "automate" the reading of comments, and modifying Word's built-in style for comment reference marks so that you can discern and read them more easily on the screen and in your printed documents.

About The Author
Brett Lockwood, brett@melbpc.org.au has been a freelance editor since 1981, and has worked with computers since 1976. He is training officer for the Society of Editors (Victoria) and teaches on-screen text editing (using Microsoft Word).

Reprinted from the May 2003 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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