I have received comments from 2 people on a Word document which I wrote. The comments of each of the responders are shown as Author (as are any comments I add)


How can I change the comments to show who wrote them so that I can then combine the changes into a new document and edit?

When the comments are added, the author's name is associated with them. However, there is an optional setting which intentionally removes the author's name when the document is saved.
Select File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings... > Privacy Options, and clear the check box "Remove personal information from file properties on save", then click OK.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thank you for this. Is there are anyway I can apply the name retrospectively? I've got lots of comments from two people and want to combine them whilst being able see who made each comment.

No, there is no automatic way. Clearing this data truly clears it.

Once the comments have been whitewashed then there is no way back to knowing who added what.

If you have two separate documents from the reviewers then you could reinstate the author names for each comment before combining. It is very fiddly so you may decide its not worth it.
I would do it by editing the comments.xml component directly:
- Make a copy of the file as a backup
- Change the file extension to .zip
- Open the file and go into the Word folder and find the file called comments.xml
- Open that file in a text editor and look through to find the value for w:author=.
- Do a search and replace for that value and replace it with your reviewers name.
- You might also want to set the w:initials value at the same time.
- Save and close the file and make sure the zip updates with that saved file.
- Rename the zip file back to docx

The relevant parts in the xml file look like
<w:comment w:id="1" w:author="Joe Blow" w:date="2018-06-05T22:41:00Z" w:initials="JB">

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia