MicrosoftThis has made it far more difficult to work with comments in the way that editors (and the people who they interact with) normally do. Some things that we often need to do many times each day – adding, editing, deleting and replying to comments – now need more mouse movements and/or keystrokes. The changes to the screen layout are also causing problems.
Instant notifications are irrelevant to the way most editors work. We don’t want the authors etc. to see our comments until we’ve edited the whole document, as we might well need to revise them later in the edit.
This is serious – people’s livelihoods are at stake here. I’m worried about whether I can continue to earn a living as an editor who mostly uses Word, as my work has become far less efficient. Please, Microsoft – give us the option to revert to the old functionality ASAP.
To summarise the problems I've found so far:
Exiting from a comment
Some of us are used to hitting the Esc key or moving the cursor back to the main text after typing a comment. Now we need to use the ‘Post comment’ button – this will slow us down considerably, and we might forget to do it and (if we've hit Esc) lose the comment. Also, the cursor seems to disappear from view after you’ve posted a comment, which is disorienting.
Reduced editing functionality in comments
Some editors are used to using Autocorrect in comments, to expand short codes into notes or queries that they regularly need to write. Now, Autocorrect doesn’t work in comments. Also, we can no longer use bulleted or numbered lists in comments; this will often make it much harder to write clear notes and queries.
Spell-checker
The ‘Check spelling as you type’ function seems to be automatically activated in comments, whether we want it or not.
No right-click
We used to be able to bring up the menu for a comment (to delete it etc.) by right-clicking on it. This no longer works.
Appearance
Each comment takes up far too much space on the screen, with the grey area, the date/time, the ‘Reply’ box and the buttons at the bottom. Also, the text in the comments often looks blurred to me.
Screen layout with change tracking
If comments and change tracking are both showing, they appear in separate lanes, so the main text is squeezed into a much narrower area than before. This will often make things very difficult, especially with complex page layouts.
Split window
If you split the window, the comments disappear from view at first – you can only see little comment icons in the right margin. If you click on one of these, a single ‘Comments’ pane appears on the right, and it’s unclear which part of the document (i.e. above or below the split) the comments belong to. If you click on one of them, the lower half of the screen jumps to a different part of the document, close to the part that’s appearing in the top half. This makes the split window function practically unusable when comments are involved.
Annoyances and distractions
When you’ve created a new comment box, the text ‘Start a conversation’ appears in it. Imagine how annoying this will get if you do create dozens of comments day. Do we really need it?
