MicrosoftThank you for coming round to respond to our admittedly occasionally testy complaints, I appreciate at least the attempt to pretend MS cares – but no thanks, this will not do. I am at a loss about whether this is supposed to make me even more furious or make me desperately laugh and cry. You say that you “have been actively listening to all the great feedback and [MS] will continue to prioritize improvements based on that”, and yet the upcoming changes the article above as well as the FAQ now outline do not reflect careful listening at all. They rather suggest that MS thinks its users are idiots who need to just have the singular self-complacent path MS envisions for them explained again more slowly and in more detail until they swallow the bitter pill MS seems insistent on pushing.
Highlight #1: “Ctrl+Enter & Cmd+Enter awareness: promote keyboard shortcut usage for post”. The problem is not that people keep forgetting hitting the shortcut, although simply rolling out the change without any explanation inside the application did not help whatsoever. (a quick google, not bing-search what the hell is going on with comments helped, though – that’s how I came to this blog post...) Sure, some people mention they keep forgetting to “post”, which is not surprising when your disruptive update tramples longstanding workflows and muscle memory. But the actual problem is that “posting” and thus only by extension the associated additional shortcut is part of an unnecessarily cumbersome process now forced on all of us, whether we work in the cloud or alone on a local document. (I’ll also add that requiring more and more keyboard shortcuts does no favours to those who have no physical keyboard easily at hand, be they tablet and stylus workers on that MS product called Surface Pro, or have disability issues with manipulating keyboards)
Highlight #2: “Tracked Changes: Show Revisions Inline: promote using the “Show All Revisions inline” setting to show track changes on the canvas instead of between the comments (see the FAQ link below to try this out today)”. This is supposed to be the solution? Really? There are multiple reasons why people do not use “all revisions inline” but need to still have revisions visible in the margin. Formatting changes are basically invisible in that mode. You’ll only find them by cycling through “next change”. Some editorial work (or prior text production, too) is also critical to exact text length and how it “fits” on the allotted page(s). If I have deletions displayed inline, this information is distorted and worthless. Basically, this is not a solution but an implicit admission that I can’t have the margin and comments display simultaneously in a sensible fashion anymore. The FAQ bluntly states as much: “Try viewing all markup inline, so it doesn't show in the margin. [...] Let us know how this works for you. We're continuing to explore the best options for using comments and tracked changes together.” If you really want to know how this works for me, I just did: it does not.
And the best piece of all: “This includes bringing back additional legacy functionality that you have told us about and are missing as well as key usability and efficiency improvements. We will be rolling out these changes in the next 3-4 months”. So we can expect to wait half a year for you to scramble and reintroduce crucial functionality you have carelessly stripped out of productivity environments because YOU apparently do not use it and consequently were incapable of conceiving anyone else would. We do not need you to tinker around with perfectly fine legacy functionality you clearly do not understand to begin with, so you can eventually “frankenstein” some of it into your atrocious modern comments.
The sensible and quick way to fix this situation and fix it NOW is to implement a toggle option in the program settings to start Word in the classic layout. This really can’t be that hard to implement if a.) that layout is obviously still part of the program code if it gets activated in certain situations, e.g. when using “compare documents” and b.) people are already hacking the registry each time they start Word just to get around. I am not against evolving functionality and I am not ruling out altogether that modern comments can be improved and could, hypothetically, someday become usable for me. I’ll also gladly admit I might, even now, occasionally switch to the modern layout if given a simple settings toggle, if only to navigate around already resolved comments (I still think an optional filter for resolved/active comments regardless of the chosen layout and view would be vastly superior, though). But as it stands the update is completely unacceptable as long as MS insists on removing choices rather than generating options.
Here's a different choice: Next month, my yearly 365 subscription is due for renewal? Hahaha, I don’t think so...
