Comments

Leaving a comment

1. Select the words you want to say something about.
2. Choose Comment in the panel that appears.
3. Write the note and add it. The passage is marked in the text, and the note sits in the margin beside it.

A note on the whole document

Not every remark belongs against a particular sentence. The comments panel takes a note about the document as a whole, for the things you would otherwise put in an email: what this draft still needs, or where you got to.

Replies and mentions

Every comment can be replied to, so a question and its answer stay together rather than becoming two notes in the same margin.

Typing @ and a name mentions somebody who has access to the document. They are told about it, so a question addressed to a particular person actually reaches them.

Resolving

Choose Resolve when a note has been dealt with. It leaves the margin and stops marking the text, without being deleted: you can show resolved comments again and reopen any of them.

When there is nothing outstanding, the panel says so rather than showing you an empty list.

Deleting a comment is different from resolving it, and is permanent. You are asked to confirm.

Who can comment

Commenters and editors can leave comments. Viewers can read the document but not comment on it. Which one somebody is comes from how you shared it.

Anything waiting for you, a new comment or a mention, is shown on Home rather than only inside the document it belongs to.

Comments stay private

Comments never appear on a published page, and they are not in a Markdown export.

This is deliberate: a private note to yourself and a question for a colleague are the same feature here, so the safe assumption is that neither is meant for a stranger reading the published version. Publishing a document you have been marking up does not publish what you thought about it.