I have already published a range of posts on issues with comment boxes or comment balloons, including ones on comment boxes suddenly going tiny, or comment box text running in the wrong direction, changing the language in your comment balloons. Thanks to my colleague, Laura, I realised that I needed to post an article on what to do if your comment box size, or the general comment box area, is bigger than you want it to be.

Help! My comment box margin is too large!

This is the problem that my friend, Laura, had. Her comment box margin was somehow spreading across almost the whole page. Although it doesn’t encroach on the text area on the page, it makes your total page really wide. It looked something like this:

Even on my wide monitor, if the comment box margin is too wide, you get the choice of being able to see all of the text, as above, or all of the comment, as below – not very helpful!

How do you resolve this issue? You need to pop into Track Changes (in the Review tab) and click on the little arrow at the bottom to give you the Track Changes Options. Right at the bottom, you’ll find options for making the comment review pane / margin smaller (and moving it to the left or top if you so desire).

The default is 6.5 cm but if you like to have your page of text bigger but still see your comments, change this to a smaller size.

Note, that like everything in Track Changes, this only changes the view on your computer – whoever you are sending the document to will see it however they’ve set it up.

Help! My comment box text is too large!

Are you experiencing this problem:

To change this to a normal size, we need to access the Styles dialogue box, by either

• Pressing Control + Alt + Shift + s simultaneously
• Going to the Home tab and clicking the little arrow at the bottom right of the Styles menu

This brings up the Styles dialogue box.

Click the right hand button at the bottom: Manage Styles. When you first open this next window, the sort order is As Recommended – click on the down arrow to change it to Alphabetical:

Find Balloon Text (note: not Comment text) and it confirms how you have your text set up (blue circle).

Click the Modify button … to change your font and font size. You’ll notice lots of other options (blue circle) to change the spacing, etc.

The standard size for balloon text is 8 or 10 so choose that and you’ll have a nice tidy balloon again!

Press the OK button, and carry on pressing OK buttons until you get back to your document. Now, your comment will appear in the style you have chosen.

Again, these changes will only affect your computer.

These related topics should help you further:

What to do if your comment boxes go tiny in Word

What to do if your comment boxes start running from right to left

Changing the language in your comment balloons

Customising your comment boxes – everything you need to know

Customising Track Changes

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

Do let me know if this has helped you, saved your bacon, etc. – and do share with the buttons at the bottom of this article.

I have already published a detailed post on how to customise your comment boxes/balloons. This issue came up for me the other day, and I wanted to note down some quick instructions.

Why are my comment balloons in a different language?

In my case, I was running a final spell-check over a document when I suddenly realised that my comment balloons were in Australian English (I realised this when the spell-checker switched over to Australian English while taking exception to a word I had not, in fact, mis-typed).

Why would this be? Well, the formatting of the comment balloons comes under its own Style, separate from normal text, so at some stage this document, or the computer it came from, or the template the author was using, had come to have Australian English as the comment box language.

How did I get it back to UK English?

How do I change the comment balloon language?

Follow the normal steps for updating the comment balloon style, so get to the styles menu by

• Pressing Control + Alt + Shift + s all at the same time
• Making sure you’re in the Home tab and click on the little tiny arrow at the bottom right of the Styles menu

This gives you the Styles dialogue box.

Using either of these methods, you will bring up the Styles dialogue box.

Click on the rightmost button: Manage Styles to bring up the next box: Manage Styles. To get to Comment Balloons: click on the down arrow to change As Recommended to Alphabetical:

Once you’ve got the list into alphabetical order, find Comment text, and then click on the Modify button. 

Click the Format button and choose Language …

And change the language:

And then all the OK buttons to get back.

You can also choose whether this change applies only to this document, or to all documents based on this template, and add it to your Quick Styles list if you want:

Press the OK button, and carry on pressing OK buttons until you get back to your document. Now your comment box language will be whatever you asked it to be!

Why not take a look at these related topics, which should help you further?

Customising comments balloons

What to do if your comment boxes go tiny in Word

What to do if your comment boxes start running from right to left

Customising Track Changes

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

Do let me know if this has helped you, saved your bacon, etc. – and do share with the buttons at the bottom of this article.

A lot of people find this blog when they’re trying to sort out specific problems with their comment boxes (comment boxes suddenly going tiny, or comment box text running in the wrong direction, changing the language in your comment balloons). Here are general instructions on customising your comment boxes (or balloons, as they are officially called) in Word.

Why would I want to customise my comment balloons?

To be honest, the main reason for doing this is if something goes wrong. But the standard, default text size and layout may not be suitable for your purposes, and you might want to change it to make it more readable for someone with limited vision, etc.

You might also have preferences about which margin your comment balloons appear in, and how big they are.

The principles we are going to learn about here also apply when you want to customise the general styles in your document, which we will look in particular another time.

If you take a look at a document with standard comment boxes, you will see they look something like this:

Annoyingly, you will need to go to three different places to make these changes. I provide a recap at the end, but a summary might be useful here:

• To change location and size of balloons: Track Changes – Track Changes Options
• To change size of ALL balloon text plus font etc.of the heading (Comment M2 etc): Styles – Balloon text
• To change font and colour of the actual paragraph of text in the balloon: Styles – Comment text

Note: my article on customising Track Changes will tell you how to change the colours in which the comments and corrections by different reviewers appear.

How to change where your balloons appear and their size

If you want to change which margin your balloons appear in, their size, and whether they are linked to the text by a line, you must go into the Track Changes Options menu. In the Review tab, click on the little arrow at the bottom of the Track Changes button and bring up Track Changes Options. There, at the bottom, is your balloons section:

I think this is fairly self-explanatory.

How to find the menu for customising comment balloon text

There are two ways to reach the menu you need:

• Press Control + Alt + Shift + s all at the same time
• Make sure you’re in the Home tab and click on the little tiny arrow at the bottom right of the Styles menu

Either of these options will bring up the full Styles dialogue box.

Using either of these methods, you will bring up the Styles dialogue box.

Now, ignore all of it except the three buttons at the bottom. Click on the rightmost button: Manage Styles to bring up the next box: Manage Styles. When you first open this window, the sort order is in what Word thinks is a useful order: As Recommended – click on the down arrow to change it to Alphabetical:

Once you’ve got the list into alphabetical order, it’s relatively easy to find Balloon Text (note: not Comment text) and you will see that it then confirms how you have your text set up (blue circle).

Click the Modify button … Now you can change your font and font size. You’ll notice lots of other options (blue circle) to change the spacing, etc.

I’m going to change the font size, font, orientation and colour of the comment box heading, and the size of the text:

Note: As we will see, the changes in colour, font and italics etc. only apply themselves to the heading of the comment text, where it says “Comment: L1″. Why? Because it’s Word, and we are changing, very specifically, information about the Comment Balloon itself. See below for how to change the text in the comment balloon. EXCEPT, and here we may tear our hair out a little, this IS where we change the text size in the comment box .

Note, however, (blue arrow) that this does not change the size of the text itself – that is controlled from Balloon Text, and you’re just going to have to remember that, or look at the Recap I’ve written at the bottom!

At this point in either menu option, you can also click on the Format button and change all sorts of aspects:

Now, you probably won’t want to go to this level of fancy detail with the comments balloons, but, of course, this dialogue box is not only for changing the style of comment balloons: it’s also where you set up all of the styles in your document if you want to change and customise them.

You can also choose whether this change applies only to this document, or to all documents based on this template, and add it to your Quick Styles list if you want:

Press the OK button, and carry on pressing OK buttons until you get back to your document. Now, your comment will appear in the style you have chosen. If you’ve only chosen to amend the Comment Balloon text size, only the header will have changed:

If you’ve chosen to customise the Comment Text as well, you will have made all of these changes:

Now your comment boxes have large, easy-to-read text in a useful colour. and a very fancy heading. We’ve customised your comment boxes or, as you now know to call them, your comment balloons, and the comment text

A quick recap

• To change where the balloons appear, and their size, use the Track Changes Options section in the Review tab
• To change the size and orientation of your comment balloons themselves, including their header, but not their text, use the Comment Balloon option in the Manage Styles list
• To change the size and orientation of the comment balloon text, use the Comment Balloon option
• To change the colour and font of the comment balloon text, use the Comment Text option in the Manage Styles list

Why not take a look at these related topics, which should help you further?

What to do if your comment boxes go tiny in Word

What to do if your comment boxes start running from right to left

Changing the language in your comment balloons

Customising Track Changes

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

Do let me know if this has helped you, saved your bacon, etc. – and do share with the buttons at the bottom of this article.

I had been editing a document for a client.  I added some comments in the margin, as always – but when my client opened it and when I re-opened it, to my horror and his, all of the text boxes containing the comments had gone TINY and unreadable. It looked like this:

It apparently happens if you’re working with a document originally created in an older version of Word which doesn’t have the requisite Styles set up for comment boxes.  You then work on it in Word 2007 or Word 2010 (this solution works for both!) and the horror happens …

It took me and Matthew longer than it should have to work out what to do, as there didn’t seem to be an easily found solution if you searched for one online – so as an aide memoire for me, for next time it happens, and as a public service for anyone else trying to work out what to do … here’s what you do (now edited to add screen shots).

What to do if your comment boxes go tiny in Word documents:

Let’s look at what the full horror looks like first of all:

First of all: don’t panic! The comments will have typically gone into Times at 1 point. But there is a way to make them readable again.

Open the document. Don’t highlight anything. Don’t put the cursor into a comment box.

Now you can do one of two things. Either hit Control + Alt + Shift + s all at the same time, or make sure you’re in the Home tab and click on the little tiny arrow at the bottom right of the Styles menu – this will bring up the full Styles dialogue box.

Using either of these methods, you will bring up the Styles dialogue box.

This looks like a very useful dialogue box, but for our purposes you need to ignore all of it except the three buttons at the bottom. Click on the rightmost button: Manage Styles to bring up yet another dialogue box.

We’re not there yet: the sort order shows as Recommended – but you need to click on the down arrow to change it to Alphabetical:

Once it’s in alphabetical order, it’s relatively easy to find Balloon Text (note: not Comment text) and you will see that it then confirms how you have your text set up (blue circle). Click the Modify button …

Now you can change your font (which will probably have defaulted to Times) and font size (which will probably have defaulted to 1). You’ll notice lots of other options (blue circle) to change the spacing, etc. – I don’t usually worry about changing those, but this is where they are if you want them – and of course you use this menu to change the styles on headings, normal text, etc., too. Press the OK button, and carry on pressing OK buttons until you get back to your document.

And there it is, all changed:

Save document

Want even more information on customising your comment boxes? Read this article full of everything you would ever want to know!

Related topics: What to do if your comment boxes start running from right to left

Changing the language in your comment balloons

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

Do let me know if this has helped you, saved your bacon, etc. – and do share with the buttons at the bottom of this article.