Thanks *chiara369* for starting this thread and for your meticulous comment. You have captured all the problems with this particular feature.
This update happened very unexpectedly for me: the computer crashed and upon restart, the comments first appeared to be gone altogether, then finally figured out how to get them back. It looks like that, on Mac, it's hard to view them in Print View -- have to toggle between Draft and Print views for the comments to become available.
And I agree with everyone here, the 'modern comments' are TERRIBLE. Microsoft keeps introducing "updates" for the sake of changing things without asking real users about functionality. The program is becoming more and more resource-heavy. Already in the previous version, the comments were worse than in previous versions. Sometimes it's good to keep things they way they are: car designers don't move the cupholder large enough to accommodate a bucket or make the steering wheel so thickly padded that the driver can put her hands around it.
I work as a copy-editor, and often leave lengthy comments. The "modern comments" are counterproductive: they take up too much space, as chiara369 explained...MICROSOFT, this is not a working document not a chat session! At least make this feature optional.
There are a lot of people like me who are condemned to using MS Word for work -- editors, copy-editors, publishers, writers... -- and the program, rather than becoming lighter and more user friendly, is getting Worse and worse.
This is just one in a series of very bad decisions and changes that neglect program functionality and user needs. Does anyone remember the nifty feature called "clipboard", for example, that allowed one to store up to 24 chunks of text in memory? How hard would it have been for Microsoft to maintain that? But no, it was too useful, so it had to go.
When the "ribbons" came in I was very unhappy because they take up so much space. I have never got used to them and learned to create small shortcuts in the top portion of the file bar. They used to appear in color, but then, surprise surprise, Microsoft turned them monochrome making them much less legible: for instance if you have the highlighter in the shortcuts you can't see what color it is.
Using Ms Word has been one long frustrating experience.
Now, the most recent update makes the program almost unusable on a 13 inch monitor. You need to have 27 inch monitor to view text at a comfortable size while accommodating all the other toolbars, sidebars, ribbons...
Can you make older versions available -- I would happily revert to Word 2011.
