Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to the Power Users community on Codidact!

Power Users is a Q&A site for questions about the usage of computer software and hardware. We are still a small site and would like to grow, so please consider joining our community. We are looking forward to your questions and answers; they are the building blocks of a repository of knowledge we are building together.

Post History

71%
+3 −0
Q&A Is there any way to delete a comment in Word without deleting its replies?

I'm responsible for combining edits to a document from a number of coauthors, accepting or rejecting any changes (and deleting any comments) that don't require further discussion, and recirculating...

0 answers  ·  posted 3y ago by Chris Henry‭

#1: Initial revision by user avatar Chris Henry‭ · 2021-08-10T23:00:10Z (over 3 years ago)
Is there any way to delete a comment in Word without deleting its replies?
I'm responsible for combining edits to a document from a number of coauthors, accepting or rejecting any changes (and deleting any comments) that don't require further discussion, and recirculating a version with only those comments and tracked changes that either still require discussion or identify something that someone else still needs to do.

In a number of places, there is a comment that has been resolved, but that is followed by a string of replies (often of an "oh, and also" sort), one or more of which has not. I therefore want to be able to delete the original comment (and any replies that have also been resolved), but not delete the reply or replies that still need to be addressed. But when I try to delete the original comment, it automatically deletes all of the replies as well.

I could copy the relevant material into another comment, but in some cases, the reply that I want to preserve was made by a different author, and while I could simply preface it with "Name Lastname said:", that seems awkward. I'm also aware that I could unzip the docx file, manually edit the relevant XML file, and rezip it . . . but that's a pain, and has the potential to introduce subtle errors that don't _immediately_ corrupt the file, but it set it up for corruption later.

Is there any way to do the thing that I'm trying to do, turning a reply by Name Lastname into a top-level comment by Name Lastname (presumably anchored to whatever text the original top-level comment was anchored to), without having to resort to awkward workarounds or direct edits to XML files?