MicrosoftThis is an absolutely terrible change. Unlike some, I have no trouble seeing the new comments or figuring out where they point to. But I *hate* that they take up so much space on the page! What's more, even if you hide them, they automatically come back up when you need to add a comment or edit or view one, so you either need to constantly select hide comments over and over again, or just give up and live with the terrible space suck of the new comments area. It's awful. Moreover, the bizarre and terrible decision to make you click a button or perform a particular keypress to post a comment means that if you forget, and you go to write another comment, you get unceremoniously booted back to your "uncommitted" comment! That can easily make you lose track of what you're doing and is a terrible workflow disruption. And that functionality only makes any kind of sense if you live edit a document with one or more other people at the same time, which many of us *do not do*. I'm a copyeditor. I edit a document on my own. The authors then review my edits afterward. There's no collaborative real-time editing going on, nor should there be; it would be a disaster, frankly, and books would be terribly delayed. So therefore there's absolutely zero reason that I should have to commit a comment before it appears. It's a pointless waste of time and effort. Several weeks in, I'm mostly in the habit of pressing ctrl+enter after each comment, though I hate it, but every time I forget I have a moment of total disruption when I next go to post a comment and instead get shot back up the document to the previous one. Did you folks even think about all this before rolling out this new functionality? I'm glad there's now at least an option to opt out. But to be honest, even though I hate the new style, I'm going to stick with it since the opt-out option is "temporary." I don't want to get used to the better, old style again just to have it yanked away. But I hope desperately that some of these issues are addressed in future releases.
