If you're working on a Word document and would like to leave notes or reminders within the document, then Word's comment feature is ready to help. If you are creating or editing a document with other people, the comment feature can help there, too; comments inserted by various people are identified as to who wrote what. So, the comments feature is really great for collaborative projects.

Called "annotations" in previous versions of Word, comments permit inserting hidden text that displays and prints only if you so desire

Inserting Comments
With desired document open, go to the location where a comment should go. Then to the command Insert, Comment.

1. The comment pane (example below) opens at the bottom of the screen. In this section, you type the desired comment.



2. When you're finished writing the comment, you can close the comment section using the Close button at the top of it.

Back in your document, notice text near the spot of insertion is highlighted yellow. Notice also that when hovering over the highlighted text, a yellow box pops up displaying the hidden comment.

[Troubleshoot: Don't see any highlighted text indicating a comment lurks there? Go to Tools, Options, View tab and select ScreenTips check box.]

Editing and Deleting Comments
Editing or deleting can be accomplished by hovering over the highlighted text and right clicking. Doing so, you see commands to edit or delete. Choosing to edit opens the comment pane again at the bottom of the screen.

Multiple Reviews/Writers
When the comments pane is displayed, comments throughout the document have the author's intials at the point of insertion. These initials become important when multiple people edit or write a given document as shown here:

If you do not have the Comments pane displayed, you can still see authors' intials by pressing the show/hide button:

Using Edit, Go To for Comments Search
The Edit menu, the Go To command, offers the option to go to Comments and by a specific author as shown here:

Printing Comments

By default comments do not print when the document is printed. However, if desired you can print the comments along with the document or print comments only.

Go to File, Print then to the Options button on the low left. Selecting Comments will cause all comments to print as a group at the end of the document. Deselecting Comments will, of course, omit comments from the printout.

When you want to print only the comments, go to File, Print then to the Print What at the bottom of the box, choosing Comments (shown here):

Authors' Initials, Be Gone!
To hide the authors' initials for display purposes or for pinting, go to Tools, Options and turn off Hidden Text. If you want to also turn off the highlighting where a comment was inserted, on this same dialog box, deselect the option Screentips.