The main reason I write the blog is to sort out my thoughts. Writing is a good way to clarify your mind.

I also use the blog to help me remember things that I do not do very often.

Like many teachers, I use Microsoft Word’s track changes facility to comment on student work.

This is also useful for marking dissertations. The problem, though, is that comments are dispersed throughout the whole 15,000 word dissertation and I would like them all together. It is possible to see all the comments as a list, but I do not think you can export them.

After some searching I discovered Kutools from ExtendOffice. Kutools for Word adds two menus to the MS Word Toolbar – Kutools and Kutools Plus. With Kutools Plus, in the File group, you can chose More and then Export Comments. Choose the whole document and  you obtain all the comments together. Very useful.

Make sure that Track Changes is off, though.

This file can easily be edited.

Many students, though, hand in their work as an Adobe pdf document. It is easy to add comments and to see a list, but it is not easy to export them as one list.

You can use  PDF Extractor from SysTools  to extract the comments and save them as an MS Word document.

The problem now is that all the comments are in individual text frames. Kutools, though can remove them.

Remove Group -> Remove All Frames
Remove Group -> Breaks -> Remove All Page Breaks

This file can easily be edited.