MicrosoftAnother detail to add to the growing pile of things evidently not thought through: you can now pretty much forget about handwritten comments or annotations and basically throw away your fancy Surface Pen if you happen to work with a MICROSOFT Surface Pro (or any other tablet with stylus digitizer). Free hand inking now flies almost completely under the radar and you have to catch it “by sight” as you read along. Previously, it popped up along with tracked changes and regular comments when you cycled through the “next change” button. This is no longer the case (as with the now decoupled comments), but free hand also won’t show up under “next comment”, of course. Now, the only way or rather workaround to find free hand annotation is via the search function and skimming for graphical elements (which will of course not discriminate between those handwritten items and any other graphics like illustrations the document might already contain).
I already can see where this is going: in a year or so, this will be celebrated as solved when the “draw” ribbon will finally get a “next ink” button or something like that. Which is the most obvious solution as well as the ‘simplest’ one (simple as in idiotproof but lazy, inflexible, and scattershot).
Don’t get me wrong: I like that I am no longer forced to cycle through comments along with the tracked changes (since the only option to avoid this was to remove comments from markup altogether, after which “next change” no longer cycled through comments but unfortunately you also no longer could see them). However, there certainly are situations where I might want to cycle to the next alteration to the document, whatever its nature is, one by one. While the current implementation means I can cycle through those categories independently, it also means I do not see either changes or comments in context to each other or in linear sequence relative to the text as a whole... How about a simple toggle or filter what to include in cycling? Is that really so hard? In principle, this already WAS halfway implemented in the “show markup” menu/button. All MS needed to do was split comments into active and resolved comments, perhaps add a separate entry for free hand ink (visibility of ink has its very own on/off toggle tacked on somewhere else in the review ribbon), and make this menu a three-way toggle instead of binary (not just visibility on and off for each category, but add a third state: something like visible but locked/skip).
