Comments to Text

I've been asked by several readers if there's a way to convert Word comments (Insert > Comment) to document text. It depends on what "convert" means. If you just need to get the text of a bunch of comments, you can open the Comments pane (View > Comments), select all, copy, and then paste to a new document. Easily done.

If you want to turn comments *into* text in the document where the comments live, here's a macro that will do the job:

Sub Comments2Text()
Dim objComment As Comment
For Each objComment In ActiveDocument.Comments
objComment.Reference.InsertAfter " <" & objComment.Initial _
& ": " & objComment.Range.Text & "> "
objComment.Delete
Next
End Sub

If you don't know how to use macros like that one, you can find out here:

Before running the macro, be sure to back up your document, just in case.

As written, the macro puts the initials and text of each comment, in angle brackets, into the document text and then deletes the comment.

If you don't want to use angle brackets, you can change them to some other character or string of characters by modifying the following two lines (note that there's a space before and after the brackets, which you can omit if you like):

objComment.Reference.InsertAfter " <" & objComment.Initial _
& ": " & objComment.Range.Text & "> "

If you don't want to delete the comments, just remove this line:

objComment.Delete

If you wanted to, you could use parentheses--

objComment.Reference.InsertAfter " (" & objComment.Initial _
& ": " & objComment.Range.Text & ") "

--and then use our NoteStripper program to turn the parenthetical comments into footnotes.

You could also use our Puller program to pull items in brackets or parentheses into another file.

Finally, you could format items in angle brackets (or other delimiters) to make them stand out from text. Red would be nice. Here's how:

1. Back up your file, just in case.

2. Click Edit > Replace.

3. In the Find What box, enter this:

<*>

4. In the Replace With box, enter this:

^&

5. Click the More button if it's there.

6. With your cursor in the Replace With box, click Format > Font > Font color > red.

7. Click the OK button.

8. Put a check in the Use Wildcards box.

9. Click the Replace All button.

All of your bracketed comments should now be red.

You can learn more about searching with wildcards in my free paper, "Advanced Searching in Microsoft Word," which you can download here:

Thanks to Jenn Morris for suggesting this topic.

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