Share via

Comment disappears, but is not deleted, when text associated with comment is deleted (Word 2016 Mac)

Anonymous
2017-08-18T18:50:01+00:00

We are a magazine which uses Word's track changes to go through the editing process with writers. Sometimes stories are thousands of words and an early round of editing can have dozens of comments and changes. We recently realized that some comments that we thought had been deleted have not, in fact, been deleted causing confusion and extra work for the writer and/or editor. We think we've figured out the situation. Here are screen caps to illustrate.

Test file with three test comments. We can see the comments in both the left and right hand sidebars.

Same test file with the words "those drunks could" deleted. You can see from the left hand panel that the comment is still there, but it has disappeared from the right hand side. You can also see the subtle little blue line in the middle of the paragraph indicating where the comment "sits".

These are my settings.

I have messed around with every track changes setting I could find and nothing helps. Is there some way to make these disappearing comments show up in the right hand sidebar? It is very frustrating to have these comments persisting from revision to revision confusing the situation.

We do realize one work around to this is to delete the comment before you delete the text, but there are several reasons this is not going to solve our problem, the primary one being that we have no control over how our many, many writers use Word, so even if we "solve" the problem through our behaviour, a writer could still cause comments to disappear.

Thanks for your help!

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

11 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2017-08-28T19:58:19+00:00

    Enabling Insertions and Deletions does not make comments reappear (or not disappear in the first place). All it does is show Insertions and Deletions. It does nothing to solve this problem.

    Was this answer helpful?

    2 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2017-08-24T15:20:53+00:00

    Hi Tisky,

    But the comment IS NOT being DELETED. It is DISAPPEARING. There is a difference.

    If it was being deleted, that would be fine. But what is happening is people using different versions of Word will see the comment that we no longer see and that has caused a lot of confusion.

    Thanks.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2017-08-22T06:40:34+00:00

    Hi Dave,

    Thanks for your update.

    Now I understand that if you replace the word in the article, the comment will disappear. Based on my test, if you replace the word in the article, the comment will not on the new word, but the comment still exists. To move forward, we’d like to confirm more information.

    1. How you replace the word in the article? By selecting the word then type in the new word or deleting the word first?
    2. We found that you are not using the latest version of Word, we suggest you update your Office 2016 for Mac to the latest version and check whether the problem still persists.

    Regards,

    Tisky

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2017-08-21T19:48:25+00:00

    Hi Tisky,

    You said:

    Based on your description, I understand that after you delete the comment in the article, the comment still displayed in the Reviewing bar, but there is no comment on the right side of the article.

    To be clear, we are not deleting the comment in the article. We are deleting the text associated with a comment. So, if have a paragraph and the word "dog" was commented on, if we delete the word "dog" and replace with "duck", the comment disappears.

    To answer your questions:

    1. Yes, to all Macs. We have no Windows machines to test this on.
    2. If you delete a comment, it does disappear.
    3. Here is our version:

    Thanks,

    Dave

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2017-08-19T07:58:32+00:00

    Hi Jamontoast,

    Based on your description, I understand that after you delete the comment in the article, the comment still displayed in the Reviewing bar, but there is no comment on the right side of the article.

    To narrow down the problem, we'd like to confirm some information.

    1. Does this problem happen to all the Macs?
    2. If you delete the comment by using Reivew > Delete, will the problem still persists?

    1. Please provide the Word version, you can check it in Word > About Word.

    Regards,

    Tisky

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments