Microsoft WORD, private markup / annotations?

December 6, 2023 7:43 AM

How can I make in-line notes and comments to myself in a Word document, and only have those comments visible to me when the document comes back and forth to me via revisions by email?

I am forced to communicate via Word documents over email. I'm willing to use Word, as much as I hate its laggy interface.

I am not allowed to use the COMMENTS feature, or any markup at all, including drawing.

I need a way to track that I have actioned the comments and make my own private, in-line notes.
How can I do that?

Could I bring the .docx into something like OneNote and write over the top of it? Could I bring the doc into Google Docs and then export it again without messing up some tables or something?
Could I bring the document into a 3rd party tool that can make it's own associated notes in a separate file in the same way SKIM PDF does?
Any lateral thinking way you can think up? Converting with pandoc and the like sounds like a bad idea, more effort and risk than it's worth for every back and forth revision.

A similar question, but not the same:
https://ask.metafilter.com/28722/How-can-I-do-track-changes-stuff-without-using-Microsoft-Word

posted by TheGreenRye to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

You could annotate a pdf of it, export the pdf comments to fdf, and re-pdf the new version and re-import the fdf file. This wouldn’t work that well in case of major structural revisions, though.
posted by music for skeletons at 7:48 AM on December 6, 2023

Can you just use the native Word commenting features while under your review, and save a local copy, then remove the comments for the version you distribute? Once a new rev comes back to you, you could use the "Compare" or "Combine" feature (in your case, "Combine" is probably what you want) to merge your local copy with comments back into the newer version. Since they are different iterations of the same document, Word should be able to match them up pretty well. You'd also have to "Accept" all the tracked changes, but that would also give you an opportunity to see what other edits have been made.
posted by yuwtze at 8:13 AM on December 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

I agree with yuwtze.
posted by samthemander at 8:29 AM on December 6, 2023

yuwtze is 100% right. Save a marked-up copy locally, distribute with changes accepted and comments stripped, and use Compare to see how your collaborators’ edits align with your notes.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:03 PM on December 6, 2023

Sorry to hear that. What a crazy setup.

You could do the above, which sounds good.

You didn't mention if you can use change tracking?

It is technically markup, but your colleague / client may not know that.

Either way, you could just copypaste relevant chunks into a seperate doc where you make your notes, add checkboxes, and just CTRL+F for the old / revised chunks in the Word docs.

Replicate the markup process just in a manual way. Silly, but actually relatively quick.
posted by KMH at 12:16 AM on December 8, 2023