Change font for comments (track changes)—Word for Mac 2016

Topic

New Reply

I use Word for Mac 2016, but I have a history of using standard Windows versions. I’ve used track changes for years. Long ago, I found the default font for comments to be too small for comfortable reading. I found that I could open the Styles pane and modify the Comments font to make it larger. That was a few years ago when I worked with Windows versions of Word.

Now I have the same problem in Word for Mac 2016: the font for comments is tiny. I can find the Comments font in the styles pane. To be precise, I see three fonts that appear to relate to comments. I see “Comment Reference,” “Comment Subject,” and “Comment Text.” I assumed that Comment Text is the font I wanted to modify, so I proceeded to enlarge the font. The change seems to have taken hold in the Styles pane, but nothing has changed with the comments themselves.

I hope someone here can show me what I’ve overlooked.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Hi LC,
Could you clarify whether in using the term “comments,” you mean the bubbles in the margin that don’t affect the actual text and that the user would typically populate with reminders or suggestions. This contrasts with the bubbles in the margin that contain actual alterations to the actual text (i.e., that appear when “track changes” has been enabled).

Dave

Reply | Quote

Yes, “comments”—not changes to the text. But I think I’ve picked up the scent of what might be the root of the problem.

I remembered that earlier versions of Word behaved differently, at least in the Windows variety. I opened the same document in Word 2016 in Windows 7, and I found my comments looked just the same as they did in the Mac version. In the Styles pane, the “Comment text” style (the sample) appeared just as I’d left it when I last modified it on the Mac.

The change seems to have taken hold in the Styles pane, but nothing has changed with the comments themselves.

That’s when the light came on. I’d tried to modify the default font for Comment text, but I had not yet tried to change the font itself.

Well … with the document open in Word in Win7, I changed the font from Calibri to Arial and the font color to plain old meat-and-potatoes black. That did it. Now I can actually read my comments without having to zoom to 180 percent!

All this raises more questions. Why did the Office design team grow so fond of the Calibri font in that bluish color? (I think it’s called “Accent 1.”) We can only speculate, I suppose. Certainly, Calibri is light weight and clean, but the color washes out at small sizes. The other question: Why did the “Comment text” style stubbornly resist changes? Why did I have to switch to a different font to get the results I was looking for?

Reply | Quote

In at least some versions of Microsoft Word, the “comment text” style governs only how comments look in a printed list of markup.

So, you might try altering the “comment subject” style. I’m not defending the name. 8^)

Reply | Quote