It gets better still: There is actually a style called "Comment Subject". However, since they can have different fonts, they may appear to have different sizes, since different fonts are differently sized at the same size, so to speak.) (The text size of this part is also controlled by "Balloon Text" and is always the same as the text that follows, i.e. These, in turn, are changed by "Balloon Text"! That is, to REALLY confuse users, font and font style (but not size) in "Comment Text" controls the text in the balloon, and font and font style in "Balloon Text" controls the font and font style of the word "Comment" and the adjacent initials and number. the word "Comment" that appears at the beginning of the comment, followed by the initials of the author of the comment and the comment number and a colon, which by default are displayed in bold and black. Why does the "Comment Text" style still have a dropdown menu for the text size that this style actually has no control over? Who knows? It must be that the designers were set on driving users crazy.Īnd now, as if all that wasn't complicated enough, the "Comment Text" style changes the font of the text and its style in the comment, except for the title - i.e. "Balloon Text", on the other hand, controls the font size but not the font style / font itself, at least for the main text (see below). As noted above, the latter is in fact controlled by "Balloon Text". That is, with "Comment Text", you can change all the attributes of the font in the comment (the font itself, its color and whether it's cursive, underlined or bold), except for arguably the most important one: the font size. For a reason that only the creators at MS would know (and whatever that reason is, it cannot possibly justify such a cumbersome and user-unfriendly way of having to do things), they thought it would be a good idea to have both "Comment Text" and "Balloon Text" control the style and size of comment text, but selectively! Where it gets tricky is if you want to change both font style and font size. The style used for changing the text SIZE in comments is "Balloon Text". You can put it to size "1" or to size "72". The style for "Comment Text" in fact does nothing to change the font size of the text in comments. When all is said and done, the shortest answer to Phyllis' question is to change the Comment Text style to reflect how you want the comments to appear.Īs other have noted, the information in this post is incorrect (at least as far as Word 2007 is concerned). This may be true in some versions of Word, but it is not true in the latest versions-modifying the Balloon Text style has no effect on how your comments are displayed. Some readers also reported that you could change the Balloon Text style and it would affect how comments are displayed. This is the body of the actual comment, as already noted earlier in this tip. So, we can only conclude that this style is one not currently used in Word. Since there is nothing called a "comment subject" that we could locate, you would think that this might change the font used to display the name of the person who inserted the comment. Comment references (and thus this style) are only used if you are viewing your document in Draft view. This style controls how the comment is referenced and numbered in the main body of the document. These styles control different elements of the comments: There are, in reality, three different styles you may want to modify, following the same steps as just outlined. Click on OK to close the Modify Style dialog box.Īt this point, any comments in your document should reflect whatever formatting you specified in step 10.Using the controls in the dialog box, specify how you want your comment text to appear.The Modify Style dialog box for the Comment Text style. Word displays the Modify Style dialog box. Hover the mouse pointer over the style name, and then click on the down-arrow that appears at the right side of the style name.Scroll through the list of styles until you see the Comment Text style.Click OK to close the Style Pane Options dialog box.Using the Select How List is Sorted drop-down list, choose Alphabetical.Using the Select Styles to Show drop-down list, choose All Styles.Excel displays the Style Pane Options dialog box. Click Options at the bottom of the pane.2Ĝlick the small icon at the bottom-right of the Styles group.To change how the text in your comments are formatted, follow these steps: Change the way the style is defined, and you change how your comments appear. She wonders if there is a way to change the default font style and size for the comments.Īs with many other formatting-related issues in Word, you can control how your comments appear based on built-in styles. Phyllis has been using the Comments tab (on the Review tab of the ribbon) to correct student papers for her class.