Printing Google Doc Comments

Learning moment for me yesterday. It all started with this text message on my phone: “I figured out how to print comments from a google doc and I am crying tears of joy”. This came from one of our Humanities teachers, Steph Nichols. Of course, we connected to talk through the process that she discovered.

The Back Story

Every year, some of our teachers have to submit Internal Assessments for IB in order for our IB students to be assessed. In many cases, the IB program needs to see evidence of the feedback that the teacher has provided the student on their internal assessment. Our students and teachers use Google docs with the commenting feature. BUT, one of the major issues with printing a google doc is that you can’t print comments with it.

Well, obviously this is not helpful. I asked Steph Nichols what she has done in the past. She indicated she would:

Print the Google Doc
Re-hand write the comments that were already provided on the google doc
Scan the document with written annotations and send to self to add in Google Drive
Then share file out as need be

The Work Around

While there are additional steps that require this work around, at least there is a way to save some time. I do hope that in the future that Google Doc users will be able to print comments without having to use the work around below.

Have Word on your computer?

Download the Google Doc as a .docx file
Open up file and choose print
If you need to print the file, go ahead and print and your comments will be provided.
If you need to submit an electronic version with comments, rather than printing, save the file as a pdf file and add this pdf to your Google Drive to share out.

Have Pages on your computer?

Download the Google Doc as a .docx file
Right click on the file and open in Pages
If you need to print the file, select the check box “print comments” and your comments will be provided.
If you need to submit an electronic version with comments, rather than printing, save the file as a pdf file and add this pdf to your Google Drive to share out.