Add, Reply to and Delete Comments in Word in Java

A comment is a note or annotation that an author or reviewer can add to a document. In this article, we will show you how to add, reply to and delete comments in Word document in Java using Free Spire.Doc for Java library.

Before getting started, please download Free Spire.Doc for Java package through this link, unzip the package and then import Spire.Doc.jar from lib folder into our application.

Add a comment

We can add a comment to a Word document by using the appendComment method of Paragraph class.

The following code shows how to add a comment to a Word document.

import com.spire.doc.Document;
import com.spire.doc.FileFormat;
import com.spire.doc.Section;
import com.spire.doc.documents.Paragraph;
import com.spire.doc.fields.Comment;

public class AddComments {
    public static void main(String[] args){
        //Load a Word document
        Document document= new Document();
        document.loadFromFile("input.docx");

        //Get the first section
        Section section = document.getSections().get(0);
        //Get the first paragraph
        Paragraph paragraph = section.getParagraphs().get(1);

        //Add a comment to the paragraph
        Comment comment = paragraph.appendComment("This is a comment");
        //Specify the author of the comment
        comment.getFormat().setAuthor("Shaun");
        //Specify the initial of the author
        comment.getFormat().setInitial("St");

        //Save the document
        document.saveToFile("AddComments.docx", FileFormat.Docx);
    }
}

Output:

Reply to a comment

We can reply to an existing comment in Word document by using the replyToComment method of Comment class.

The following code shows how to rely to an existing comment in a Word document.

import com.spire.doc.Document;
import com.spire.doc.FileFormat;
import com.spire.doc.fields.Comment;

public class Comments {
    public static void main(String[] args){
        //Load a Word document
        Document document= new Document();
        document.loadFromFile("AddComments.docx");

        //Get the first comment
        Comment comment1 = document.getComments().get(0);

        //Create a new comment
        Comment replyComment1 = new Comment(document);
        replyComment1.getFormat().setAuthor("Chris");
        replyComment1.getBody().addParagraph().appendText("Hi, thank you for this information!");
        //Add the new comment as a reply to the first comment
        comment1.replyToComment(replyComment1);

        //Save the document
        document.saveToFile("ReplyToComments.docx", FileFormat.Docx);
    }
}

Output:

Delete comments

We can either delete all the comments or a specified comment from a Word document.

The following code shows how to delete all the comments from a Word document by using the clear method of CommentsCollection class.

import com.spire.doc.Document;
import com.spire.doc.FileFormat;

public class DeleteComments {
    public static void main(String[] args){

        //Load a Word document
        Document document= new Document();
        document.loadFromFile("AddComments.docx");


        //Delete all the comments
        document.getComments().clear();


        //Save the document
        document.saveToFile("DeleteAllComments.docx", FileFormat.Docx);
    }
}

The following code shows how to delete a specified comment from a Word document by using the removeAt method of CommentsCollection class.

import com.spire.doc.Document;
import com.spire.doc.FileFormat;

public class DeleteComments {
    public static void main(String[] args){
        //Load a Word document
        Document document= new Document();
        document.loadFromFile("AddComments.docx");

        //Delete the first comment
        document.getComments().removeAt(0);

        //Save the document
        document.saveToFile("DeleteSpecifiedComment.docx", FileFormat.Docx);
    }
}