Forum Discussion
Can I remove Modern Comments and revert back?
Send feedback to Microsoft to let them know what you think about the so-called modern comments; for instructions, see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-do-i-give-feedback-on-microsoft-office-2b102d44-b43f-4dd2-9ff4-23cf144cfb11.
Microsoft's rationale about "posting" is mentioned in the support article at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/using-modern-comments-in-word-edc6ae71-0a2d-49fe-8faa-986f1e48136a (which you may have seen already).
Finally, you should see an option to temporarily revert to the previous, more user-friendly interface at File > Options > General. Clear the check box next to "Enable modern comments."
Even after more than a year,, there seems to be no thinking going on at Microsoft in this regard and users are still forced in June 2022 to use the bloated, Adobe Acrobat-like comment feature. The defects of this so-called new style of comment insertion are mentioned all over the Internet. It is functionally very limited; has lost most of the power of old-style comments; wastes a lot more of user time as well as screen estate; and is a wonderful source of irritation, if you ever lacked it in your day to day work.
Assuming you also track the changes in your documents, you can actually get back to old-style comments. But seeing that Microsoft has shown the history of having the idée fixe of continuously worsening the user experience with its "new" features (often a poor copy from other OSes), this might not be usable for much long.
What you need to do is:
- open a document
- make some tracked changes in it
- save it as a different document.
- use the Compare feature to compare the "old" version and the "new"
- save the resulting document,, again, as different (or just go ahead replace the old one with this)
And that's a rather long of it! You have a document that has the old-style comments and any new you insert will be the old style one with all its functions.
Suhaag I tried your recommendation and mostly it worked. When I insert a new comment, the panel still pops up, which did not happen in the previous versions--only with the Modern Comment addition. I appreciate your effort to work around this tremendously inconvenient "improvement."