New article
Recently updated
How to Accept and Close Comments in the Classic Interface
Who is this article for?Please Review Users accepting and closing review comments.
Review Authors can accept and close comments and proposed changes.
This article relates to accepting and closing comments and proposed changes in the Please Review classic interface which is used for all document formats other than Microsoft Word and PDF. By default, all reviews of Microsoft Word and PDF documents are presented in the Please Review review interface, refer to Accepting and Closing Comments.
- Accepting and Closing Comments in the Classic Interface
- Give Reason
- Comment Categorisation
- Making New Comments or Proposed Changes
- Editing Proposed Changes
- Accept/Close All
- Further Reading
Accepting and Closing Comments in the Classic Interface
Participants with the role of Author or Owner in a review can accept and close comments and proposed changes. The purpose of accepting and closing comments is:
- It allows a comment or discussion thread to be closed-off in a manner which all Reviewers can see.
- It provides feedback for the comment reconciliation report.
- It allows for the control of the behaviour of comments and proposed changes when they are included in the resulting Word and PDF document (or report, for other document formats).
Comments and proposed changes can be accepted and closed whilst the review is ‘In Progress’ or after the review has been ‘Closed’ by the review Owner, but not when the review status is ‘Completed’.
To accept or close comments or proposed changes, the Author/Owner should enter the review and open the comments window as if making or viewing a comment/proposed change.
In addition to the standard options available, the Author/Owner will have ’Accept’ and ’Close’ options for each comment and proposed change:
Give Reason
If enabled, the ‘Give Reason’ setting can provide a ‘one click’ accepting/closing of comments and proposed changes. Adjacent to the ‘other comments’ area is the ‘Give Reason?’ drop-down box:
| Give Reason | Description |
|---|---|
| Always | Always prompted to give a reason. |
| Never | Never prompted to give a reason. |
| Close Only | Only prompted to give a reason when closing. |
- It is possible to turn ‘Give Reason?’ on/off as required, and therefore the Author can alternate between settings for each comment/change if appropriate.
- The same logic applies to withdrawing a comment. There is no prompt for a withdrawal reason if ‘Give Reason?’ is set to ‘Never’.
- ‘Give Reason?’ is a system configuration setting and therefore may be disabled.
Comment Categorisation
If the comment categorisation feature is enabled, the Author/Owner will be able to re-categorize the comment or proposed change during the accept/close process:
Making New Comments or Proposed Changes
If an Author/Owner makes a new comment, proposes a new change, or revises as existing change they have the additional option of ‘Apply + Accept’. This means that the comment or change will automatically be accepted as soon as it is applied:
Editing Proposed Changes
In addition to ‘Accept’ and ‘Close’, each proposed change has the option to ‘Revise’:
Selecting ‘Revise’ will allow the Author/Owner to edit the proposed change. If the Author/Owner applies the edits, Please Review automatically closes the original proposed change with an appropriate close reason being given and creates a new proposed change (attributed to the Author/Owner) with the revised text. This maintains the integrity of the audit trail.
Accept/Close All
Authors/Owners can accept or close all comments at once. In the comment window above the ‘Other Comments’ section is the ‘Accept/Close all’ option. This will open the comment selector window allowing you to select/de-select types of comments and enter a reconciliation comment:
- As the Author/Owner selects/deselects the checkboxes they can see how many comments are affected by clicking on ‘Refresh’ to the right of ‘Number of comments currently selected’ at the bottom of the window.
- If the action selected is ‘Accept All’ and (a) all proposed changes on a paragraph are selected and (b) none of these proposed changes conflict, then they will be merged, and the merge accepted.
- If the action is ‘Accept All’ and some of the proposed changes on a paragraph are selected whilst some are not, no changes will be accepted.
- If the action is ‘Accept All’ and all changes are selected on a paragraph but there are conflicting proposed changes, none of the changes will be accepted.