MicrosoftChrisTribble the "What's next" section can be found by scrolling to the top of this web page, then going down a bit.
Here it is, for convenience:
What we have heard
As we have rolled out the new Modern Comments experience in Word, you have shared valuable feedback about how it affects your workflows and what is and isn’t working for you. Your feedback enables us to improve the experience for all users.
Here’s some of what we’ve heard:
What’s next?
- Concern that comments created Modern comments are not backwards compatible – We want to ensure you are aware that any comment created with Modern comments can be consumed and interacted with by users on earlier or non-Microsoft 365 versions of Word and vice versa.
- Reduced efficiency in working with comments, particularly in posting or editing comments
- Not all formatting is supported in comments, such as font color
- Not all content is supported in comments, such as images
- Autocorrect is not supported, including custom autocorrect shortcuts used to save time
- Comments and tracked changes layout takes up screen real estate and pushes comments further from the page
- Grammar checking is not available in comments
- It is more challenging to see where comments are connected to, without the dotted lines
(Updated as of August 9, 2021)
As previously noted in this post, we have been working on bringing a set of changes to the experience to address the feedback from this community.
- Quick Edit: we will make it easier to enter edit mode for a comment such as showing the edit button on hover.
- Ctrl+Enter & Cmd+Enter awareness: we will promote keyboard shortcut usage for post.
- Comment anchor connection: we will make it easier to see what a comment is referring to.
- Tracked Changes: Show Revisions Inline: we will 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).
- Image support: support to display existing images (note: support to add new images to comments will come in a subsequent update).
- Selection interaction improvements: we will make it easier to expand and read another comment while a draft comment is in progress.
- Reported bug fixes such as printing PDFs with comments.
In addition to these planned updates, we have also heard your broader feedback about the current ability for Modern comments to support more complex workflows and are making the following additional changes.
- Opt-out: we are adding support for a new opt-out toggle in Word’s Options dialog. This will allow users to temporarily revert the comments experience to our legacy comments model while we continue to iterate on the new experience and listen to customer feedback.
- Font colors: display font formatting.
Unless noted otherwise, these changes will be released with the October 2021 monthly update.
Note: due to additional compatibility issues discovered with 3rd party screen readers we will be temporarily turning off Modern comments for all Current Channel non-preview users. We plan to turn Modern Comments back on, with the updates described above, for customers with the October monthly update.
We have additional updates planned beyond these as well, and we will let you know more in the future.
What you can do
We have outlined a set of FAQs that give guidance and tips on the most common questions we hear from customers, including workarounds available to you today. Please visit the help article and scroll to the bottom to view these: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/using-modern-comments-in-word-edc6ae71-0a2d-49fe-8faa-986f1e48136a
Please continue to leave https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-do-i-give-feedback-on-microsoft-office-2b102d44-b43f-4dd2-9ff4-23cf144cfb11?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us#platform=Office_for_the_web about the experience. We actively review this feedback to prioritize improvements.
If you don’t have Modern Comments yet but can’t wait to try it, join our https://insider.office.com/join.
See our support page for more information: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/using-modern-comments-in-word-edc6ae71-0a2d-49fe-8faa-986f1e48136a.
Note to Microsoft: almost no-one wants a "richer" comment experience. They want an efficient, effective one. It's a very boring, utilitarian feature - albeit one that's very important to a lot of peoples' workflows, including mine - that needs to be as unobtrusive as possible whilst still doing its very tedious, unexciting job.
