In addition to tracking the changes made to a document, you can insert notes, or comments, to ask questions, make suggestions, or explain edits. To insert a comment, you select the text to which the comment refers, click the New Comment button on the Reviewing toolbar, and type what you want to say in the balloon that appears (in Print Layout view) or in the Reviewing pane (in Normal view). In Print Layout view, Word highlights the associated text in the document in the same color as the balloon and adds your initials and a sequential number to the balloon itself.
You can work with comments in the following ways:
To display the reviewer’s name and the date and time the comment was inserted, you point to either the commented text or the balloon.
To review comments, you can scroll through the document, or in a long document, you can jump from balloon to balloon by clicking the Next or Previous button.
To edit a comment, you simply click the balloon and use normal editing techniques.
To delete a comment, you click the Delete button in the Comment balloon or click the Reject Change/Delete Comment button on the Reviewing toolbar.
To respond to a comment, you can add text to an existing balloon. You can also click the existing balloon and then click the New Comment button to attach a new balloon to the same text in the document.
If the complete text of a comment isn’t visible in its balloon, you can view it in its entirety by clicking the Reviewing Pane button on the Reviewing toolbar. In addition to displaying comments, the Reviewing pane displays all the editing and formatting changes you have made to a document. Click the Reviewing Pane button again to hide the Reviewing pane.
You can turn off the display of comment balloons by clicking Comments in the Show list.
If multiple people have reviewed a document and you want to see the comments of only a specific person, you can click the Show button, point to Reviewers, and then click the names of the reviewers whose comments you don’t want to see.