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Microsoft Word 365: why ‘modern comments’ are awful for editors

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I think it’s a given that whenever there’s some form of software update, I’m going to initially dislike it. First of all, there’s the disruption of the update itself, waiting for something to download and restart until I get my program back, no doubt occurring at the most inconvenient moment. But then there’s also just that it is a change. It’s not that I genuinely hate change of course; it’s more that I’ve fallen into a habit of things being in a particular place or looking a certain way, and there’s something frustrating in the process of getting used to a new system.

Old version of Microsoft Word saying I was once the future

Of course many updates are necessary to address security issues and other bugs. Other updates are necessary because designs do fail in the user experience (UX), and developers should be looking to improve this. For instance, the template for this blog didn’t initially have the logos redirecting back to the home page, which breaks a convention; if even I, who knew the design, kept going to an ‘about’ page accidentally, then that clearly would happen to visitors. So it needed to be redone. In other cases, however, it’s not that you’ve got something broken to fix up, but more about adding enhancements to the software.

Whatever the reason for the change, it usually just takes a few hours or days with a new version for it all to click back into place. Then you get up and running, hopefully even with some new functionality that you can start to take advantage of. And you find that you wouldn’t change back.

Unfortunately, it’s not just a minor fail in UX or something that I can get used to with Microsoft’s latest release of Word 365 and the complete redesign to the way comments work. This appears to be a case of an update that has been made with one set of users in mind, and perhaps not realising or testing how it would play out to another set of users.

It’s been clear that over the past year there’s been a dramatic increase in the use of instant messaging and video conferencing systems at home and work, with Microsoft’s solution being Teams. And that’s where the idea for this update, the so-called ‘modern comments’ obviously comes from. What has happened is Word comments have been adjusted so as to make them like a social media comment or IM; you are no longer making a comment, you are starting a conversation!

How a modern comment looks when you first open it

The issue comes in that editors aren’t starting a conversation. We’re, on the whole, not working in real time with others. We’re working on our own, using a functionality that has existed for decades with the goal of, at the end of our work, having an edited document that includes clear, detailed and formatted comments, with that document then usually taken away to be worked on elsewhere.

These new commenting experiences are ideal for today’s remote teams who may be working together from across town or around the world

A detailed look at modern comments reveals many features that are painful for editors, which have been elegantly summarised by Cybertext, and I agree with much of what is written there.

The ‘features’ that I find to be far the worst though are related to editing of comments, spellcheck and formatting.

In order to edit a comment, where you used just to be able to click in your comment and start typing, now you have to click on a three dots menu, click edit, do your edit, click post. It’s even worse if you want to edit someone else’s comment from an earlier version of Word, as you have to go through a warning about how you will potentially lose formatting that was available but now isn’t (yes, you can no longer have anything but bold, italics, underline and highlight in your comments; tough if you dare to want to use a superscript, it will drop back out into plain text).

Screenshots of editing Word modern comments

Screenshots of editing Word modern comments

Spell checking also appears to be designed on the assumption that once you’ve ‘posted’ your comment, you won’t be needing to check it much or do substantial adjustments to anything you’ve already written (i.e. that the conversation has moved on). However, reworking of comments is something editors do all the time as meanings becomes clear in later sections of documents, and you have to go back and change what you previously decided to convey.

So, although, while you are first writing your comment, you do, thankfully, get your usual squiggly spellcheck underlines to indicate the errors, once you go out of your comment, then come back and enter via the edit option, you only get squiggles in new text. And don’t think you can rely on spell checking the entire document at the end; that won’t pick up any errors in your comments.

Word modern comments not highlighting spelling

Speelllling (twice)

Finally, if you want to repeat stuff from another comment, better make sure you copy the text you want to use first. No leaving a blank a comment to mark your place and copying in from other comments; no, they are are all ‘locked’ because a user (only it’s you because you’re working on your own) has a comment in progress. It is true you can at least copy-paste text in from the main document or the web - and also true that you will need to. You can’t use the special characters menu from within modern comments, so cue some scrolling around to find that β symbol you used four paragraphs ago - although, watch out, because, sometimes, but not always, those will become ‘b’s in your comments.

So, how to deal with this change. First, we as editors can complain. Microsoft does have an in-app feedback method that gives you the opportunity to say how you don’t like something. You can also add your voice to the ever-growing thread on Microsoft’s tech community blog post on modern comments, and then there’s always that bastion of social media complaint forums, otherwise known as twitter (#rollbackmoderncomments, #microsoft_modern_comments_suck etc.).

I have also, over the days I’ve been ‘getting used to’ to this new version, found a few tips that are helping me deal with the this productivity-zapping change. There’s a shortcut key (Ctrl + Enter) that you can use to post your comment. And I have got into going back into posted comments, without any of the nonsense of the three dots, from the reviewing pane.

Screenshot of alternative comment views

Screenshot of alternative comment views

Unfortunately, because the reviewing pane is a separate window, the one shown on the far left here (the middle view shows how you can see your comments as a list, for whatever reason you might want that…), you don’t get any contextual information on the location of your comments from that view, limiting how useful it is (nor any spell checking at all).

So right now, it’s just waiting and hoping to see if Microsoft pay any attention to our feedback. Good news on that so far is a promise for some ‘legacy’ features returning, and we might soon (well in at least 3-4 months) be able to get into the ‘edit’ mode via a ‘hover’ over the comments, saving all of one of the newly introduced clicks in the process of editing your comment!

Quick Edit: We will make it easier to enter edit mode for a comment such as showing the edit button on hover.

For editors who don’t yet have modern comments, my more immediate advice is to consider reaching for the stop auto update button before it’s too late.

Extra shots

Credits

  • Image of a very old version of Word by Pedro Santos on Unsplash (no longer available).
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