I am posting this as a public service. Part of my revision process involves printing out my manuscript in Microsoft Word.

I work in WordPerfect because it thinks the way I do. But there’s one feature of Word that’s really helpful when I do a marathon sit-down and read-through with my editing pen in hand. You can print the ms with your comments and edits in balloons in the margin…so you know what you were thinking as you worked.

But the "new" Word, which comes as a subscription for 10 bucks a month, doesn’t want you to do this. After monkey around for way too long, googling "print showing markup" and all possible variations, I requested a call from Microsoft help. The phone rang immediately (boggle)…and the helper monkeyed for another 40 minutes (remotely) with no success. She promised I’d get a call from a higher power in 4 hours. That’s a long time to wait for a higher power.

So I monkeyed some more, and lo and behold:

There you go. You have to go to the opening screen of Word, then click OPTIONS, and then click DISPLAY. Look under "printing options" and check the box that says "Print hidden text."

Then CTRL-P, and there are your comments.

Simple, huh?

You’re welcome.