

(That’s a mystery we may never solve.) Now, all I had to do was click the Modify button in the middle of the window and change the text size back to 8 point. Somehow, my boss had inadvertently changed the Style so that its text was 1 point size rather than its usual 8 point. Sure enough, I found the culprit pretty quickly. That, not coincidentally, also made it much easier to find the Styles I was looking for because they were in Alphabetical order rather than the Recommended order, which is the default (and not very helpful in moments like this). The launcher for it is a small grey downward facing arrow on the Styles portion of the Home tab:Ĭlicking the arrow will bring you to this:Ĭlicking on the button circled in red above will take you to the Manage Styles dialog:īy default, Microsoft Word will not actually show you all of the Styles available within this window, so I chose the Alphabetical view in the Sort Order drop-down above and un-checked the “Show recommended styles only” box to make sure that I could see all of the Styles, including the three I needed to check. The Manage Styles pane isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to find in Microsoft Word.

It was simply a matter of getting to the proper Style and then correcting it.

It turns out that there are three possible Styles that would control the size of text in a comment balloon: Comment Text, Comment Subject, and Balloon Text. And within minutes, a much more readable form of the document was winging its way to the client. Fortunately, a quick Google search led me to a forum post that told me exactly what I needed to know. I knew it had something to do with the Styles feature, but I had to do a little research to figure out exactly which Style would control the text within the balloon. All he knew was that his fingers had been flying over the keyboard one moment and the next moment his comment balloon had seemingly deflated. He was completely mystified, as was I, about what possibly could have happened to make his comment text so small and unreadable. Yikes! Who could possibly read that? That comment balloon is way too small! He was getting ready to send out another reviewed document, when he opened it up from his outgoing e-mail and saw something like this: Marked-up documents have been flying back and forth via e-mail, and the Microsoft Word Track Changes feature has made life a lot easier for him. He’s been using Track Changes a lot lately, and it’s turned out to be a pretty handy feature for him, since he’s been doing a lot of contract work. And now for a dispatch from the “Well, I’ve never seen this before” Department … Just when I thought I had seen it all, my boss threw me a curve ball, courtesy of his new-found affection for Microsoft Word’s Track Changes feature.
