Word 2007 comments

Factual Questions
1

Having recently upgraded from Word 2000 (it’s been a bumpy transition), I’m having trouble understanding how comments and reviewing work — or rather, getting them to do what they used to do. Unfortunately, almost every page that discusses Word also has a “comments” section, so searching has been fruitless.

My greatest concern is getting Word to check spelling in comments. I can’t believe that such a vast swathe of editable text can go un-checked, so I’m assuming I’ve left some option in the oh-so-intuitive Ribbon unnoticed.

The other major thing I’m trying to figure out is how to easily open comments while working. I know how to get there via the ribbon, but I find it a bit cumbersome. I’m used to simply double-clicking the comment marker in the text to open the comments pane (hovering to preview the comment still works the same).

Lastly, and it may be picayune, but how do I get the reviewing pane — or anything — to show only comments when tracked changes are visible on the screen? That is, in Word 2000 I could have tracked changes visible (e.g., colored text and strike throughs) and any document comments displayed below the text. Now, it seems that whenever I make insertions/deletions visible on screen, it also dumps every single change into the reviewing pane. When you have a hundred comments and hundreds of changes, this is problematic. I’ve experimented with show markup options and track changes options, but to no avail.

Any help?

Thanks,

Rhythm

2

My Word 2007 checks spelling in comments just fine. I get the red squiggly line under misspelled words, and if I actually run the spell check on the document (Review tab, Spelling & Grammar button), the misspelling in the comment is flagged. Check to see if you have spell check turned off: Click on the Office Button and click the Word Options button on the bottom of the menu. Then, click the Proofing section and look at the options and what’s checked/not checked.

On the opening comments question, I’m assuming that if you can’t see the comments pane all the time, you may have changed the option to view comments inline (Review tab, Balloons button). If you want to leave that setting, then you can RIGHT click on the inline comment and choose Edit Comment to open it up.

I can’t help with the more complicated question about what types of tracking changes to show when. It’s been a long time since I worked with Office 2000 and I never worked with tracking that much to begin with. Have you looked at the Show Markup button on the Review tab? You could uncheck all the other types of changes to show except comments if desired.