Introducing Modern Comments in Microsoft Word

OK, why on Earth would you "improve" comments by:

1. Making it harder to see where the comment points within the text by eliminating the in-text highlights and dotted line connecting the text to the comment box; 
2. Requiring the comment to be "posted" by either using an enter arrow or keystroke command rather than, say just typing it normally;
3. Requiring the user to open a drop down to select "edit" just to be able to continue or revise the comment;
4. Wreaking havoc when the document is used on different versions of Word; and
5.  Eliminating spell and grammar check within the comment so people can see what a terrible speller I am?

Was there some compelling user movement to make inserting and utilizing comments more difficult so less people used the function, or was this simply a make-work project for a bunch of folks who needed to show there leaders they were busy?  No doubt that the task force who devised this "improved" version did not understand that requiring users to take extra steps to use the tool each time and making it harder for the reader to see where the comment points tool is not actually helpful.  Or perhaps the update team was full of folks who believe that the 17 people who believe writing documents in Adobe is somehow the "bomb" and Word was falling behind by not adopting the stylistic and functional ineptitude of such a program. For the love of God, please allow those people who actually use the tool to have the option to use the normal/usable version that has been with us without issue for the last decade, or at least a version where you don't have to hit three select buttons to insert a **bleep** comment.  I suddenly miss WordPerfect!     

How do I turn this format off and go back to the original format of viewing comments?

Susan Coward

I can second (or third?) the concern about compatibility issues between versions of Word, and not only in terms of backwards compatibility. Having the exact same Word version 2103 (build 13901.20336 click-and-run) on two different Windows 10 systems (Pro 1803 and Home 20H2), both of which are logged into the same personal 365 account, the new comments format had suddenly been forced upon me without warning or at least any explanation whatsoever on Friday on my work machine, while my tablet thankfully has somehow been ignored so far.

I do not know about collaborative communication; I have a different work case – I use comments for my own mental notes. Still, in my own documents I now have issues between both PCs. Contrary to what the support page Nick Hunn referred to states, I did not encounter missing comments yet – the modern comments I created for testing all appeared as ‘traditional’ comments on the other PC. However, I now have a bunch of old comments, which I no longer can edit on my work machine – I get an error warning stating that this app has difficulties displaying the content of this comment, and by continuing I risk corruption or entire loss of data.  

I can only assume this is about formatting – I regularly used comments to store additional citation information, expanded versions of quotes, etc., and the developers in their infinite wisdom have apparently decided that this is no longer what comments should be used for, but become a messenger tool. (How about a marginal notes tool, then? something that does not interfere with the text length or formatting like foot/endnotes do)

[Edit: I think I can confirm it must be formatting: created a traditional comment with a tab stop aand one character in superscript - both discarded after opening as modern comment and ignoring the warning]

Susan Coward is absolutely right in criticising this new lack of functionality inside the comments! While I did see some spellchecking (underlined typo), search seems wonky and you are severely limited in what you can do in comments now – formatting seems restricted to the bare minimum of bold/italics/highlight, and even in order to get there you need to jump through hoops because the right-click context menu is crippled.

On that note, editing comments is an absolute hassle now. While I can relate to the move from real-time editing to send-off-comments or locking comments of others (in testing earlier, the document became barely usable while also open in the second PC), this is not just a wrench thrown into the workflow but an entire toolbox’s worth. If you want to do something simple like highlighting for color coding in an existing comment, you need to click the ...-menu, click edit, click the text, then move the cursor to the ribbon bar and scroll over to the start ribbon (because you probably are on the review ribbon) since you no longer can use your right-click context menu, apply highlight, scroll back to the review ribbon, click send – and hope that nowhere along the line the UI has failed to register what it should focus on and scroll or click.

Like Susan, I sometimes suspect that new features are simply crammed in because somebody thought they are great for whatever specific scenario they had in mind or in order to ‘fix’ some previous user requests or complaints without thinking about global ramifications or what other use cases get derailed in the process. And all of this would be half as infuriating if introduced as a new OPTION, but no, time and time again arrogance reigns supreme, it seems.

I'm pretty sure that the resolved/unresolved comments thing was not an isolated user request/complaint (because there were multiple forums ranting about it and I know at least one person who sent a suggestion through the feedback tool...), and while I greatly appreciate the current improvement, I'd rather have the choice or better a toggle/filter instead of sombebody simply deciding what gets displayed in which view... why not give the comments pane a filter?

When is the tasking feature known from the Web coming to Win32 apps? Is it coming at all? I can't wait for the announced integration between these comment-sourced tasks and To-Do, but to complete the circle, that would have to supported in rich Win32 clients. Any horizon for that?

nickhunn Similar problem here. I work for a publishing house, and most of our authors use older versions of Word than we do, or open source packages. This will be an utter disaster!
The loss of autocomplete/replace means I have to have another doc open with parts to copy/paste over when needed. Not conducive to speedy work when you have lots of standard comments. I really don't want to transfer many more of those over to macros/keyboard shortcuts than I have done.
I do not understand the need for much change on this. Anyone wanting that sort of ''I need an answer now"' kind of reaction to a comment is surely already using a messaging app with colleagues, I know we do. But even if collaborating in real time, there are many of us collaborating on documents but at different times that do not need this approach. Couldn't there be a means of switching real-time collaboration off and maintaining the old system?
It wouldn't be so bad if it at least maintained proper functionality. Instead it appears to be "background listening'' whilst you type in a comment, as it says something like "comment in progress'' in the Reply part of other comments. It doesn't catch clicks well, I found I had to change cursor focus and click away first for it to recognise a click in order to edit. And of course you have to now click Edit rather than just clicking where you had previously typed. I discovered search works but also rather randomly. 
I have only been on a single screen today so I did not have the experience of multiple windows (usually I split between two screens). But I also dislike the fact comments take up so much space. I don't understand the idea behind the contextual view. The biggest problem I had with comments was their disappearing after comparing documents and accepting all changes.

I hope there is a revert feature in the future. If that is indeed a fact that comments won't be backward compatible, this really won't fly at all. 
I have to wonder whether coders at MS actually ever use these products extensively themselves. I note the big fanfare statement about a comment pane can now be seen on the right.

I have rolled back to March 18th successfully ... anything more recent just left comments as they were in "modern'' form.
Having given up on resisting the grey icon "progress"on toolbar appearance and updating last year, it looks like 5 months into my subscription, I am forced to turn updates off yet again until autotext/complete returns. Thankful I managed to revert successfully. I will note down how I did it because i'm sure I will eventually need to yet again and I always forget exactly how to.

There's a sting in the tail at the moment, which is revealed on your support page, which says that "If you view a document in which a colleague has inserted a comment using the modern comments feature, you won't be able to see it in the older version."  That means that anyone who is not using modern comments, will not be able to see comments inserted by those who are.

I work on technical standards, where we have contributors and reviewers from many different companies, who will be using different versions of Office on MacOS and Windows, depending on their individual corporate policies.  This sounds like a recipe for disaster, where we will lose multiple comments.  Although I like what I've seen so far, I need a way to revert to classic comments if my colleagues who haven't yet got access to modern comments are going to be able to see what I'm doing.  So far I can't see how to do that.

I also echo MoMaier's comment that this wastes a lot of space, particularly if you're using a vertical orientation screen.

Thanks MS for making my super smooth workflow clunky and entirely p'ing me off! Insert autotext, autoreplace text, and spell check no longer actually work IN COMMENTS!!!! This means I cannot spellcheck comments I make, nor can I search in them, and it takes me three times as long to write them. I cannot begin to tell you how angry this has made! So instead of working I am yet again having to take time out to restore a previous version in order to remove this "feature"! But yes you've achieved your aim of making it look very pretty! Yet another case of eye candy winning over actual functionality! It really makes me wonder why I bother paying for your software instead of doing what half the planet does and using a cracked "copy"
LIVID 😡

Thank you for the brief outline of the updated comments function; it is good to see that Microsoft is persistently striving to improve the workflow. However, while most of this sounds sensible (particularly in a collaborative context) and there are some details that are especially appreciated (the separation of comments from tracked changes means you no longer need to cycle through all your comments when looking for redactions with the ‘next change’-button without having to make comments invisible from markup altogether as a workaround; the choice between contextual view and comments list is fantastic, as is the ability to now skip resolved comments), there are now new headaches – too many to list here.

Just the most infuriating and incomprehensible change is this one (on the Windows desktop app at least):

Why do comments in contextual view now float in a separate, additional lane? That the list view, i.e. a comments pane will take up dedicated space is only logical, but the principally preferred contextual view defies any rhyme or reason. That its comments freely float only masks the fact that they now effectively run in their own margin - next to and in addition of the regular markup margin (now nonsensically empty, vacated aside from the occasional tracked change of formatting, and yet you cannot disable it without going to simple markup view and also losing visibility of in-line additions/deletions). Basically, you no longer can work on a screen in vertical orientation, or use two windows of Word side by side (or zoom out to view two pages in a single window) without having to choose between comments OR all markup view...