This page highlights NowComment's many advanced and unique features, some of which are in our “Site and Document Features” video. Basic features (e.g. uploading and sharing documents, starting new conversations, reply to existing comments) are covered in some of our overview texts and in our “NowComment Basics” video.
Our default “2-Pane View” shows the original document to the left and comments to the right; you can read the document without much distraction and find any related comments on interesting passages, images, or embedded videos by clicking their word balloon. Dragging the blue vertical bar between the panes changes their relative widths.
“Combined View” puts the document and comments together in a single pane, useful if you're already familiar with the document and know you want to read all the comments (if the document isn't familiar having lots of comments breaking up the text can be distracting). Documents print in this view.
You can control how comments display in both 2-Pane and Combined views: “Full” shows you the complete comments (Summary + Full Comment fields), while “Summaries” shows just the Summary fields. Viewing just Summaries gives you a great overview of what everyone's talking about, especially useful when you don't have time to read all the comments.
By default, in both 2-Pane and Combined views, comments appear in document sequence; comments on Paragraph 1 come first, then comments on Paragraph 2, etc. Sorted Comments uses the 2-Pane layout to provide four alternate ways to sort comments:
These show at a glance each person's comments on the document; our Multi-Document Report option shows people's comments across multiple documents. Sorting by name is useful in many cases, but in particular it makes grading/evaluating really easy for teachers and bosses!
If you'd like to get an email notification every time someone makes a new comment on an important document just turn on the “Updates” feature. Updates save you from having to visit the document just to check whether there's anything new. You can turn Updates off at any time.
If you want to hide your reply from everyone but the person you're repling to and from the Document Owner (he/she can always see all comments!) click the Private Reply checkbox in the “Reply” window.
In NowComment you share a document by inviting people or Groups to read and discuss it with you. Inviting people is the only way to share a Private Document; Public Documents can be found via search engines. For more information see our overview of Inviting.
Note: once you invite someone to a document, or someone invites you to a document, that person is automatically added to your Address Book, which lets you type in just a few characters of their name or email address to invite them to another document. We have tools that let you import names and email addresses from your Gmail account, from Comma-Separated Value files (data in a list with commas between items, e.g. “animal, vegetable, mineral”), and from Outlook accounts (also via its CVS option). A link to your Address Book is on the pulldown menu by your name.
Groups have two purposes:
For more information see Creating Groups for Document Sharing.
The default setting for uploaded documents is are Private, meaning only people and Groups that you invite can see and comment on them, and they aren't indexed by search engines. You can override this privacy default and set a document to be a Public Document, meaning it can be indexed by search engines, can be read by anyone on the Internet (including all comments that aren't private replies), and can be commented on by anyone with a NowComment account. Our Public Documents homepage displays a few new and featured Public Documents.
We don't offer social media tools for Private Documents (since they are supposed to be private!). For Public Documents, on the other hand, we provide both Facebook and Twitter links in the blue navigation strip near the top, and an AddThis plug-in that lets you share Public Documents via Tumblr, Pinterest, and hundreds of other social media services.
Access Dates let you control when others can read, comment on, and see others' comments on a document (the document owner can always do all three).
For example, an instructor could:
The document owner can change these setting as desired, e.g. set the Commenting period for Wednesday-Friday but then reopen comments for a second round the next week.
In addition to Uploading, printing, and inviting/sharing documents, here are some other options available from the “More”
menu while viewing a document (some of these are also available from the My Library Options menu):See our documentation here. Note that NowComment's flexible comment notifications system lets you control the volume of emails (if any) you get when people comment on documents in your students, colleagues, or friends comment on your documents. You can choose to get notified only when people reply directly to you, or when they comment on a conversation you've posted to, or each time someone comments on one of your “Favorite” documents, or comments on a document in a Favorited group, etc.
Sample uses of Favoriting to regulate your email notifications:
There are three ways to get a document onto this “Favorite” list:
Our “Multi-Doc Report”, can show all acomments made on a variety of selected documents. You can run it from the My Library Options menu; just click the checkboxes for each document you want included on the report, give a date range (optional) for the comments, specify how you want the comments sorted, and choose whether you want comments within that sort order to be broken out by document or all gathered together. Sorting by name is useful in many cases, but in particular it makes grading/evaluating really easy for teachers and supervisors!