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Writer's pictureNolan Cubero

A way to see how many "uncompleted" comments you have in Word

Here's a macro to see how many "uncompleted" comments you have in a Word doc.


When I began addressing my editor's notes on Shadow Drive, I found that instead of going linearly page by page, I began attacking the easy notes first. I wanted to wait to address the hard notes last since I needed time to think about them. But as I bounced around the manuscript addressing notes, I had no idea of how much progress I was making.


The problem is Word doesn't really provide you with a good way to keep track of how many comments you've addressed. They do provide the Reviewing panel, but it only tells you how many comments are in the manuscript. They don't tell you how many comments you still have left to address. The easiest solution is to just delete the comments you've finished. But I wanted to "resolve" the comments so that they would still be in the manuscript for reference later. Another issue is that sometimes I didn't address a note or at least didn't address it in the exact way suggested, and I explained my reasoning by responding to the editor's comment. The problem is the Reviewing panel only shows you the total number of comments. If you resolve or respond to a comment, that number doesn't change.


I needed some sort of progress indicator.


So I wrote this macro that will return how many "uncompleted" comments you still have left. By "uncompleted," I mean comments you haven't resolved or responded to. If you resolve, respond, or delete a comment, the "uncompleted" number goes down. Here's the code:

Sub howManyUncompletedComments()
Dim i As Integer
Dim f As Integer
Dim g As Object
Dim h As Integer
Dim sMsg As String

    For i = 1 To ActiveDocument.Comments.Count
        'count all comments that have not been marked resolved
        If ActiveDocument.Comments(i).Done = False Then
            f = f + 1
            End If
        'count all comments made by me
        If ActiveDocument.Comments(i).Author = "Nolan Cubero" Then
            f = f - 1
            End If
        'count all comments I have replied to
        Set g = ActiveDocument.Comments(i).Replies
        h = h + g.Count
    Next

    'subtract my replies from total
    f = f - h
    
    sMsg = "You have " & f & " uncompleted comments."
    MsgBox sMsg
    
End Sub

If you don't know how to setup a macro, follow this process:

  1. Show the Developer tab

  2. Open Visual Basic (which is in the Developer tab)

  3. From the Menu Bar, click Insert > Module

  4. Paste above code into module. You'll only need to change the name of the author to your name.

  5. Close Visual Basic.

  6. Add a Macro button to the ribbon.

  7. Then just click the button each time you want to see how many unresolved comments you have left.

Even if you do work linearly, this should still be helpful since the comments you have are probably not distributed to each page evenly.

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