Collecting comments on a document

This guide explains how to collect and process comments on a document. It assumes you are familiar with the basics of attaching notes to it.

Making a document annotatable - adding it to your A.nnotate account

Just as for providing feedback on a document you've been sent, the first step is to get it into your A.nnotate account. There are two ways to do this.

Method 1: uploading

Log in at a.nnotate.com. At the top right of the documents page there is an upload button. The button brings up an upload box.

Click "Browse" to select the file. The other elements are optional: you can add some notes about the file to help remember what it is, and below that is a list or recently used tags. You can associate these with the file just by clicking them, or you can create a new tag by typing it in the line below.

Finally, clicking "Upload" transfers the file to A.nnotate.com and the annotatable version should appear a few seconds after the transfer is complete.

Method 2: email

The other way to get a file in is to send it as an email attachment to cc@nnotate.com . The system uses the address you sent the message from to work out who you are, so if you have multiple email accounts, you should send it from the one you use with A.nnotate. When the file arrives A.nnotate will send a message back to you with a link to open up the annotatable version.

Issuing invitations to comment

Documents in your account are initially visible only to you. To enable other people to see them you must send them a special link that will add them to the list of authorized viewers. This is done with the "Send" button when viewing a document that brings up the box shown alongside.

You can enter several email addresses separated by commas in the address field to send the message to several people.

Alternatively, if your email is configured to open from the browser, the link below the text will open the message in the client where you can select recipients and edit the text in the usual way.

Uploading and issuing invitations all in one go

There is a simple shortcut for the above steps. If you email the document out as an attachment to the people you want to comment on it and include cc@nnotate.com in the list of recipients, then the document will be added to your A.nnotate account and each of the original recipients will be sent a link enabling them to annotate it.

Attaching comments and replies to notes

All authorized viewers of a document can attach new notes to highlighted text, and reply to existing notes on the same copy of the document. This makes it simple to start discussions centred about particular parts of text, so you can resolve issues more quickly.

Checking on comments as they arrive

The documents list shows all documents in your account with the most recently commented on one at the top.

For each document it also shows how many notes there are and the author, text and time of the last annotation so you can quickly find out what is new.

Click on the document name to view it in the browser along with the comments. You can also download the original PDF or Word document using the icon links. To jump to the index of notes on a document, click on the pin icon next to the document name.

Recent comments and the notes index

If you have several documents under review at one time, it may be easier to use the notes index, shown alongside.

This shows all annotations on all documents. It can be ordered by date (most recent first), subject, tags and document name. Click on a tag name to shows only the notes with that tag; the search box can be used to find particular words in the text of a note.

Processing feedback and generating a new version

You can use the "reply" function on a note to add or remove tags. For example, you could remove a "suggestion" tag and add a "done" tag when a particular comment has been processed. The searching and sorting HOWTO presents the different ways to display and modify notes.

Once a document has been uploaded, it is not possible to edit that copy online but you can upload another version with the same name. A.nnotate will list the most recent one first, and you can add a description / tag with the version number when you upload it. If a document goes through several rounds of revisions, there will be a complete record of the different versions and the comments on each still within their original context.

By deleting or tagging comments as you go, you can still use comments from earlier drafts while working on a later version.

You can remove old versions from your account on the documents page by first selecting one or more documents with the checkboxes on the left and then using the controls that appear at the top of the list.

You can also change the tags on documents the same way to help classify them and make them easier to find.