How to Display or Hide Comments in Word 2016

Word 2010 For Dummies

Add a comment to your Word 2016 document, and the markup area appears on the right side of the page. The markup area appears whenever a document features comments, but its appearance is controlled by settings on the Review tab.

To hide the markup area, click the Review tab. In the Tracking group, click the Display for Review button, shown here.

The four available options set how comments, as well as other document revisions, are displayed:

Simple Markup: Chose this item to display the markup area and view comments and revisions.
All Markup: Choose this item to display the markup area. Any comments or revisions are shown, along with lines referencing their locations in the text.
No Markup: Choose this item to hide the markup area. Comments don't appear, and any revisions are hidden in the text.
Original: Choose this item to hide the markup area as well as any revisions made to the document. With regards to comments, this item is identical to No Markup.

The markup area appears best when viewing the document in Print Layout view. Web Layout view also shows the markup area on the right side of the window.

If you choose Draft view, the comments appear as bracketed initials highlighted with a specific background color. For example, comments look like [DG1], where DG are the author's initials and the 1 represents comment one. Position the mouse pointer at that text to view the comment in a pop-up bubble.

When Word is in Read Mode view, comments appear as cartoon bubbles to the right of the text. Click a bubble, similar to what's shown here, to view the comment.

To view all comments, no matter which document view is chosen, summon the Reviewing pane: Click the Review tab, and in the Tracking group, click the Reviewing Pane button. Choose either the horizontal or vertical display to summon the Reviewing pane and peruse comments as well as text revisions.

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.