How to Display and Review Comments in Word 2013

Word 2010 For Dummies

Normally Word 2013 uses the cartoon bubble as your clue that a comment exists in the text. When you point the mouse at text, it becomes highlighted, showing where the comment is. But when you’re really curious about what was commented on and who said what, you can reveal all the comments at once. Follow these steps:

Click the Review tab.
Click the Display for Review button menu.

The button is found in the Tracking group, and its icon is shown in the margin. The button’s name depends on which Display for Review mode is chosen.
Choose the All Markup command.

The document changes its view again. Comments are highlighted in the text with a color specific to whoever made the comment. A dashed list extends beyond the right edge of the onscreen page, and you see comment text.

To restore the cartoon-bubble view, choose the Simple Markup command from the Display for Review button menu.

Choose the No Markup command from the Display for Review button menu to hide all comments in your document.
The Inking command switches the display to All Markup view.
Word also has the Show Comments button, though clicking this button doesn’t control whether comments are displayed as cartoon bubbles or full comments.
Clicking the Next and Preview buttons to review your comments also switches the display to All Markup view.

Peruse comments by using two commands in the Comments group:

Choose the Next Comment button to jump to the next comment in the document.
Choose the Previous Comment button to jump to the previous comment in the document.

To see all comments in a document at one time, summon the Reviewing Pane button: Click the Reviewing Pane button, found in the Review tab’s Tracking group, to show or hide the Reviewing pane. The button’s menu sets whether the pane appears vertically or horizontally.

Close the Reviewing pane by clicking the Reviewing Pane button again, or click the X in the top-right corner.

The Reviewing pane displays all comments in your document in a single list, as shown on the left (vertical) or bottom (horizontal) edge of the window.
Click a comment in the Reviewing pane to instantly go to that location in your document.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.