Organizing comments in Acrobat

You can organize the comments in your Adobe® PDF document in a number of ways. By default, comments are listed in Adobe Acrobat® 8 as they appear in the document from start to end.

Requirements

To complete this article, you will need the following software:

Adobe Acrobat 8

• Try
• Buy (Professional)
• Buy (Standard)

Prerequisite knowledge:

Basic knowledge of working with the commenting tools in Acrobat

Organizing comments

Here are a few tips for organizing comments:

• If you are working on a large document, or if you want to check what you have added to a document, sort the comments by selecting them from the Sort By pop-up menu (Figure 1). For example, click Type to reorganize the comments in the Comments List according to the type of comments used in the document.

   

  

  Figure 1: Sorting comments makes it simpler to locate those added by a specific author or a type of comment.

• If you want to see some of the comments, you can filter them. Select a filtering option from the Show pop-up menu, and then a specific type of filter (Figure 2). For example, if you choose Show by Reviewer, a submenu opens listing the reviewers.

   

  

  Figure 2: Filtering the comments shows only a subset of the total comments in the review document.

• When you apply a filter, the Comments List shows the message “Comments are hidden because a filter is active in the Show menu.” The message is a good reminder for you to check whether you have addressed all the comments in the document or whether a certain reviewer has seen and commented on the document.
  
  

  Note: Filtering does not apply to the comment replies. If you have added a series of comments and replied to other comments as well, sorting the comments by author displays only your original comments.

• In the Comments List, add checkmarks to identify comments. Checkmarks are used for any purpose you like, such as making a To Do list, and are not seen by anyone else in the review. Sorting according to the Checkmark Status reduces the list to two categories: Marked and Unmarked (Figure 3). The categories are closed initially; expand a category to reveal its contents.

   

  

  Figure 3: Sort comments by using internal checkmarks, a great method for organizing your work.

Copy that

You can import comments only once; if you are working on several versions of a document, save copies and number them sequentially. That way, each time you send comments for a round of reviews you have a copy of the document that can accept comments.

Find that word

Click Search on the Comments List toolbar to open the Search window at the left of the screen. Next, type the search term, specify capitalization and whole words, and click Search Comments. Once Acrobat processes the search, it displays the results in a list in the Search panel. Click the search result to highlight the comment in the Comments List and on the document page.

Get it together

If you have a large number of comments addressing the same thing, you can group them together as one comment. Click the Hand tool on the Select & Zoom toolbar and click the first comment. Shift-click to select the others you want to include in the group. Select the comments from the list or directly on the document page. Then right-click (Control-click) the selected comments on the document page only, and choose Group (don’t right-click on the Comments List as the shortcut menu doesn’t contain the command). The comment displays the grouped icon on the Comments pane’s listing.

To ungroup the comments, right-click (Control-click) any of the comments in the group and choose Ungroup. Each then becomes a separate item in the Comments List. In a grouped comment, the comment’s status, text you add in notes, and any replies to the comments are shown only for the first comment you select—it is hidden for the other components in a grouped comment.

Where to go from here

For more information about commenting in Acrobat 8, check out these other great tutorials:

• Exporting comments to a Word document (Windows) from Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker
• Working with the Comments List in Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker
• Tracking a review in Acrobat 8, by Donna Baker

About the authors