Small City Law Firm Tech

I was asked a question today: “Can we merge the Comments on a Word document?  We sent the same document to 2 different people and they inserted Comments on their copies, then sent the copies with Comments back to us.  Now we have the original document and 2 more documents, each with their own Comments.  Can we merge the Comments on those 2 documents so they’re easier to review?”

My first reaction was “Nah, you should have turned on Revision Marks and worked with the document that way.  Too bad, so sad (I’m still grumpy…) – you’ll have to eyeball the Comments on a printed version.

Then I drank my morning coffee and gave my answer further thought.  I told myself I must be wrong – there HAS to be a way to do this.  I mean, when you think about it, this kind of situation must happen regularly and Word is a mature product.  So I drained the last drop of caffeine, and off I went to Word to do some digging.  And I found out, happily, that I was wrong – there is a function built into Word to combine Comments (and more) and it’s called ‘Compare’ (whodathunk?).  Here’s how to use it:

So here is your original Document (I’ve used some random text and given the document a title and some headings, just to break up the text:

And you’ve emailed this document to 2 recipients for their Comments, using the ‘Review ‘New Comments’ routine, they highlighted the text to be commented on:

·         Review Ribbon

·         New Comment

The recipients then returned the documents to you.  Now you have 2 documents with comments (in addition to your original, pristine copy):

One like this:

And the other like this:

(Now pretend this is a 30 page document and you don’t want to review it comment by comment, side by side, on paper, because, frankly, you have better things to do with your time…)

MSWord to the rescue!

First, save each of the Documents (returned by way of email attachment) with names that differentiate them, so you know which is which.

Then, with both documents closed, click on

·         Review Ribbon

·         Compare, then

·         Combine

The Combine Document box will appear.

You have 2 areas to browse for documents.  In the ‘Original document’ area, click to browse for one of the documents with Comments, and select it.  Once it’s selected, move to the ‘Revised document’ area and click to browse for the other document with Comments and select that one.

Now that both documents with Comments are selected for combining, click ‘More’

After clicking ‘More’, you’ll see the expanded ‘Combine Documents’ box, where you can make some choices that will affect your results.  If you just want to merge the Comments and no other revision information, uncheck all other boxes.  (in a ‘real’ situation, ymmv – check and uncheck as necessary).  In the ‘Show Changes’ area, ensure that Word level is selected and in the ‘Show Changes in ’ area ensure that ‘New Document’ is selected.

Click ‘OK’

Because you selected ‘New Document’ your original documents are left completely intact and you will now have a completely NEW document with the Comments merged onto it, like this:

Much, much easier to review, no?  Save as desired.

I can anticipate your next question (because, well, I’m psychic that way…): “But I have 3 (or 4 or 5 or 6) separate copies of the document, each with their own Comments.  Now what do I do????”

Well, my little tech acolyte, you get yourself busy and keep repeating the above process, using the last ‘combined’ document as the next ‘Original document’ and another Commented upon document as the next ‘Revised document’, two by two, until they’re all finally combined into one mass of combined Comments in one document. Wasn’t that fun?