Navigating comments by a specific user in LO Writer

English
#1

Hello everyone!
It’s been some six-ish months since I switched from MS Office to LO entirely, and I absolutely love the experience, especially after the most recent releases, which finally support touchscreen scrolling. Legendary! However, there’s one thing that I can’t figure out yet. It concerns comment navigation (via the standalone Navigator or the navigation menu in the sidebar), namely, sorting comments by a specific author. I regularly deal with lengthy documents that have been edited and commented by other people apart from me, and being able to navigate comments by a specific user would be super helpful. This function in MS Word saved me a ton of time and effort. For instance, a 200-page document contains comments from Jeff, Mary and Jake; I’ve already seen Jeff and Mary’s comments, but Jake reviewed the document after them, so only his comments are those that matter, and I want to see them specifically. In MS Word, I’d use the Ctrl + H menu, where there is a tab (a button or whatever it’s called) that allows to search comments by a certain user. But I can’t find anything like that in LO Writer, just the general comment navigation, where I only find all comments by all users, and it’s a bit frustrating.
I refuse to believe such a crucial function is absent in LO or that I am the only person in the world who finds it useful, so instead of making premature conclusions on this, I decided to ask veteran users first. Is it really so, people? If yes, does anyone happen to know whether there are any plans to implement this feature anytime soon?
Before anyone suggests that I create a report for the developers or something like that, I must say I don’t know how to do it (yet). I’m not an IT or sysadmin type of guy, but just a regular user and a complete newbie in the Libre community.
Anyways, thanks in advance for any possible advice or information on the issue.

PS: Thought it might be important to indicate that I use a Windows version of LO.

#2

If you have Track Changes on, then in the sidebar the Manage Changes pane will allow you to filter by Author

#3

Thanks for the reply. Well, I know of that, but it’s not really the thing, as in this case, you see ALL the changes made by the user (i.e., what they inserted, deleted, or paraphrased), and the comments (which are called bubble comments in MS Word) are part of them, which certainly makes the navigation simpler, but still, you have to scroll a lot to find a specific one you need. What I’m looking for is the possibility to jump from one comment left by the user to the other, and them alone. Like, I don’t want to see where they added or removed commas or endings to words. Is there possibly an add-on that enables that? From my experience so far, add-ons and macros are what makes LO so awesome and configurable. They’ve been really handy in making my work smoother.

#4

The only workaround I can suggest is to require from your co-workers to start their comments with their initials.

In the Navigator, category Comments, you have a single-line version of comments contents. You can quickly navigate from one initials-tagged comment to the other.

Comments can’t be sorted alphabetically in the Navigator, so you still have some scrolling.

#5

Yup, thanks. I actually was thinking of something like that. Alas, that’s what I was afraid of. However, it doesn’t mean the software is bad. It would be stupid to refuse from it because of one missing feature. I still love it and going to keep on using, simply paying more attention to details in the texts. :slight_smile: Meanwhile, just like with the touchscreen scrolling, the only option I’ve got left is waiting until this function appears one day.

#6

One thing you didn’t tell: are you exchanging with your co-workers in DOCX or ODF? Though it is not relevant to your present question (comment navigation), exchanging in DOCX will have a huge impact on your document structure and stability. In particular, it will ruin any attempt to control globally your document through styles.

#7

Good point. My bad, sorry. I actually deal with DOCX and even DOC, as those I work with all use MS Office. Often, one document can go through a chain of different versions of MS Office, some as old as MS Office 2003. You know, the older a person, the older the version, as a rule – a great example of why you shouldn’t underestimate the power of a habit. I’m a freelance translator, and the people I work with are various editors and others related to making a text look nice and smooth after I’ve done my share of work. They’re mostly freelancers or remote workers as well, and I’m not a boss to any of them and can’t order them to switch to LO to work with ODF, so after I finish my work, I always convert my texts into DOC or DOCX (while working with them as ODF in the process of translating, since it really is a way smoother experience). As for me, I myself simply opted for LO over MS as part of my long-term strategy to stop pirating, and again, I have no regrets about it :slight_smile:

#8

You could make an enhancement request, How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Wiki

1 Like
#9

Thanks. As I see, that’s another way to solve my issue :slight_smile:

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