If you've started using Microsoft Word 2002, you've probably seen the little "balloons" that display your comments and tracked changes. In my opinion, these are pretty much useless in a professional environment. For example, if you get many deletions on a page, Word will abbreviate the balloon messages, so printing these for an author to review is of little help. Yes, you can print the changes separately (File > Print > Print what: > List of markup), but trying to compare this list with the document is cumbersome.
Online review isn't much better. An author can use the Reviewing toolbar to go from change to change or comment to comment in the Reviewing Pane, but that's not how real people read. I want to see the corrections and comments clearly marked inline--just as they were in previous versions of Word.
Good news: After mucking around in the bowels of the program, I've discovered a fix for revision tracking:
1. Click the "Tools" menu.
2. Click the "Track Changes" tab.
3. Under "Balloons," uncheck the box labeled "Use balloons in Print and Web Layout."
Wow, what an improvement! No more balloons, and revision tracking is handled inline the way it used to be. To print your document showing tracked changes, do this:
1. Click the "File" menu.
2. Click "Print."
3. Under "Print what:" select "Document showing markup."
Now for the bad news: There is no fix for comments--at least not that I can find. In previous versions of Word, each comment had an inline reference (like "[JML3]") and a corresponding reference at the beginning of the comment. That was a good system, easy to use and understand.
With Word 2002, these references have gone away, so it's now difficult to figure out what part of the text a comment refers to. You can move from comment to comment using the browser arrows at the bottom right of your screen, but that's a poor substitute. Even worse, there seems to be no way to print comments at all without enabling those stupid balloons. Microsoft, are you listening?
If you know of a way around this problem, please let me know. If not, you can always resort to typing coded inline comments [[like this one]] that can later be deleted with a wildcard Find and Replace:
Find what: [[*]]
Replace with: [nothing]
Maybe if we all wrote to Microsoft about this, they'd stop gumming up a perfectly useful word processor. Maybe we should send balloons.
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READERS WRITE
Brad Hurley (bhurley@sover.net) wrote:
I usually use bibliographic software for references (EndNote, which integrates nicely with Word), but occasionally I have to edit documents that use Word's endnotes and footnotes. Is there any way to insert footnotes or endnotes into text boxes? We frequently prepare documents with sidebars, which we create with text boxes, but there doesn't seem to be any way to add footnotes to them if we need to cite a reference. Maybe there's a better solution for creating sidebars than using text boxes?
I replied:
As you've already learned, text boxes don't support footnotes or endnotes. However, frames do.
So if you can use frames rather than text boxes, that should solve your problem. To get a frame in Word 2000, you have to click Tools > Macro > Macros and then select "Word commands" in the "Macros in:" dropdown list. Then click "InsertFrame" in the "Macro name:" box. Then click the "Run" button. Finally, use your mouse to draw the frame in your document.
Please note that this kind of frame is not to be confused with the Format > Frames command, which creates HTML frames for use in Web pages.
Wordmaster Steve Hudson wrote:
So, you went and installed Word 2000 and set the templates and wizards to Run All from My Computer. Now when you go File > New there is a plethora of tabs and templates, none of which you use anyway. So now you want to clean them out.
Step 1 - Uninstall the templates. Otherwise Word will keep on replacing them when you delete them! Change Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add / Remove Programs > Microsoft Office > Change > Add / Remove Features > Microsoft Word for Windows > Wizards and Templates to Not Available. Update Now > OK > Close.
Step 2 - Dump the following lines into a new text file and rename it Killer.bat. Double-click it to run it. It gets rid of the last few problem children for you.
%HomeDrive%
cd "%ProgramFiles%Microsoft OfficeOffice"
rmdir Broadcast /s /q
cd 1033
del Feedback.htm
del Thankyou.htm
Thanks to Brad for his question and to Steve for his cleanup procedure.
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RESOURCES
Expertise Publications features "articles, tip sheets, white papers to guide you through all aspects of using Microsoft Word." Especially if you're migrating from WordPerfect, you'll find some useful information here:
http://www.microsystems.com/publications.htm
