How to stop comment renumbering in Word 2007?

If I send a document out for review to a number of people in succession, each
of their comments is assigned a number, as expected.

Subsequently, if I delete their comments as I address them, all comments
after the one I deleted renumber themselves. Is there any way to stop this
and to permanently assign a number?

After one comment has been deleted, the number in their version of teh
commented document and the number in mine are different for the same comment,
which makes referring to comments over the phone (e.g. to discuss the
comments) much harder.

Why not just assign numbers permanently?

Is there anything I can do?

What I do is either deal with the comments in reverse order, or delete
the contents of the Comment balloon as they're taken care of without
deleting the balloon.

On Nov 6, 6:34 am, Tim Fitzpatrick
<TimFitzpatr....TakeThisOut@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
> If I send a document out for review to a number of people in succession, each
> of their comments is assigned a number, as expected.
>
> Subsequently, if I delete their comments as I address them, all comments
> after the one I deleted renumber themselves. Is there any way to stop this
> and to permanently assign a number?
>
> After one comment has been deleted, the number in their version of teh
> commented document and the number in mine are different for the same comment,
> which makes referring to comments over the phone (e.g. to discuss the
> comments) much harder.
>
> Why not just assign numbers permanently?
>
> Is there anything I can do?