How Modern Comments Work in Word for Windows

Microsoft originally published message center notification MC240609 on February 21 to inform organizations about modern comments in Word (for Windows). An adjusted schedule means that Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise (Office Pro Plus) users will experience modern comments when Word receives its current channel update in June (I am using Version 2105 Build 14026.20164).

While Microsoft 365 roadmap item 76186 promises “a more productive with a consistent commenting experience between Word, Excel and PowerPoint.” For now, Word is a little ahead of the other Microsoft 365 apps. According to MC256459, PowerPoint will get modern comments in late August. Interestingly, while Word allows older version to see modern comments, PowerPoint will not.

Comments in Word are important to the Office 365 for IT Pros writing team. We use comments extensively to track places where chapters need to be updated following changes released by Microsoft, or when our technical editor looks over text to ensure its accuracy. The advent of modern comments seemed promising, so we plunged into the detail.

Improved Commenting

Modern comments bring two important improvements. First, for documents stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, Word supports @mentions to allow reviewers to target the person to respond to a comment. Second, unlike the previous implementation of comments which show the text of comments during composition, modern comments must be posted to become visible to other readers of a document. In other words, you don’t see a comment until the person making the comment is happy to share their views and clicks the Post button (Figure 1). This doesn’t sound like much of an advance, but it is important when commenting on complex topics when the comments often take some time to compose, review, and complete.

Preparing to post a modern comment in Word for Windows
Figure 1: Preparing to post a modern comment in Word for Windows

Mentioning People

The @mentions work the same way as elsewhere inside Office 365. Create a new comment and @mention a user in the directory (tenant or guest account). If necessary, Word prompts for the user to assign permission for the @mentioned person to allow access to the document (Figure 2). The need to assign permissions is likely the reason why @mentions don’t work outside the tenant.

Word prompts the user to assign permission to allow an @mentioned person to respond to a comment
Figure 2: Word prompts the user to assign permission to allow an @mentioned person to respond to a comment

Prompting for permissions is more obvious when working with documents stored in OneDrive for Business. I never saw the same query for documents from SharePoint Online sites, but those @mentioned were able to open and respond to the comment. Some magic is going on here!

Word Online is also able to assign tasks to @mentions. Tasks is a loaded word in the Microsoft 365 context, where it means a task object like those created and used by Outlook, To-Do, Tasks in Teams, and Planner. Office doesn’t create Microsoft 365 tasks. Instead, it has its own task assignment, reassignment, and completion capabilities (Figure 3) and the tasks created do not show up anywhere else.

Assigning a task in a Word modern comment
Figure 3: Assigning a task in a Word modern comment

Users can view, respond to, and resolve assigned tasks using Word on mobile devices. Figure 4 shows how a comment appears in Word for iOS after receiving a notification in email and clicking through from Outlook.

Dealing with a comment in Word for iOS
Figure 4: Dealing with a comment in Word for iOS

Emailed Notifications

With permissions (and optionally, task assignments) in place, Word sends an email notification to the person to let them know about the mention. Comments use two different kinds of email:

  • @Mention (including task assignments): Word impersonates the user who created the comment so that email appears to come from their mailbox. The message goes to the person mentioned. The document owner receives a separate notification. A copy of the message is in the user’s Sent Items folder.
  • Other comments: SharePoint Online sends notifications from no-reply@sharepointonline.com to the owner of the document. The message shows the commentator’s name as the from address (Figure 5). The commentator’s real email address is in the reply-to attribute. Exchange Online tags these messages as external.

@Mention notifications usually arrive sooner than other comments.

A notification email arrives with comments from SharePoint Online
Figure 5: A notification email arrives with comments from SharePoint Online

Processing Comments

Microsoft has done a good job of the mail notifications for comments. For example, each comment contains a preview of the text around the comment so that the reader knows what the comment relates to. If an organization doesn’t want users to receive preview snippets in email, they can disable this by running the Set-SPOTenant cmdlet. You can’t disable or enable preview snippets for individual users or groups; it’s either on or off for the entire tenant. The default for the setting enables preview snippets. To disable preview snippets, run:

Set-SPOTenant -AllowCommentsTextOnEmailEnabled:$False

The Add a comment button seen in Figure 5 allows recipients to respond to a comment inline without leaving the message. Recipients can use this feature from OWA or Outlook desktop, but they can only do so once. If they want to add to their response, they’ll need to go to the document. To enable this to happen, the Go to comment button disappears and the Add a comment button changes so that it opens the document at the comment.

The ability to respond directly to comments inline is not unique (Yammer introduced a similar capability for OWA in early 2020). Being able to review a complete set of comments and respond inline without needing to open the document is very convenient, even if it means that you’re often only postponing the work needed to respond to comments more thoroughly.

Auditing Comments

Making, responding to, or removing comments are document modifications. SharePoint Online captures these operations as FileModified events in the Office 365 audit log.

Useful Modern Comments

Overall, modern comments shouldn’t cause people experienced with Word any problems. It takes a little while to become accustomed to posting a comment rather than simply entering the text, but it’s soon second nature. The contextual preview in notifications is very useful as is the ability to respond inline. Just about the only thing I don’t like is Word’s implementation of tasks. If Microsoft 365 is to operate as an ecosystem with common objects shared between applications, it seems strange that Word does its own thing here.

19 Replies to “How Modern Comments Work in Word for Windows”

  1. I hate the new system of posting comments in word 365. I don’t want them emailed to my collaborator until I am finished with the entire draft. It would be very annoying to keep getting comments as they are posted when I am not working on the document. How can I go back to the old system?

    1. I don’t think you can. One thing you can do is not use Word comments and instead insert your text inline with the text you want to comment on. If you use a different color, your comment will be very obvious.

      1. Why should I have to do that? It defeats the whole purpose of using the Word comment feature! Why should we have to find a workaround to fix a feature that a multi-billion dollar company should and can easily do?

  2. I HATE IT. IT WORKED FINE BEFORE. I don’t need yet another button to click. and using another color or the other suggestions above are not a good substitute for the prio way whcih

  3. This forced comments update is terrible and has lengthened the time it takes for me (and thousands of other people) to do our work. There are many, many forums online going back at least a year about how disastrous this has been for anyone who does editing or marking work. It is so awful for marking student papers, for myriad reasons. The comments are way too far away from the text to allow for meaningful feedback (not everyone has an extra wide monitor). Having to post the comment rather than just hit enter is annoying and an unnecessary extra step. If you forget to hit enter and then go to enter a new comment, the document will jump back to the prior comment and you lose your work flow. There is no autocorrect in the comments box (why?!). Having comments separate from track changes is ridiculous as an editor or a teacher, when you want to explain why you made certain changes **in the comments**. I feel like these changes were made by people who definitely do not write, edit, or mark for a living. How is Microsoft ignoring thousands of complaints from people who hate this update. It’s truly awful. PLEASE give us a way to opt out of this terrible update, or I will be forced to switch to another product, as many have already done. I am so dismayed by how much this has affected my productivity and the time it takes to mark papers.

    1. I admire your passion. It took me time to get used to modern comments but I think I have mastered them now. AT least, they don’t bother me as much as they used to at the start.

  4. Hi there,
    It is a nice blog i really read it thoroughly, keep updating us with new one

  5. I agree with those who disparage Microsoft’s latest “improvement.” As Tony Redmond points out, it leaves the much more cumbersome alternative of interlineating comments in the text, making both the text and the comment harder to read.

    LibreOffice is looking better and better. I despair of Microsoft ever learning that most basic lesson: if it works, don’t fix it. If my publisher didn’t insist on documents in Word format, I wouldn’t be using Word at all.

    Does Microsoft ever run possible changes to its programs by actual users before saddling them with changes that actually make Microsoft products more cumbersome and less useful?

  6. I hate modern comments! We should have the option to return to the old way which was so much faster to use!

    1. Amen to indierawdesigns! Although Tony Redmond pointed out, the “best case” seems to be that they “don’t bother me as much as they used to at the start.”

      Trust in Microsoft to (a) know what’s best for everyone, and (b) introduce less and less functionality and flexibility in its programs with each improvement.

  7. Add me to the list of people who hate having to do an extra step to make a comment. Who on earth would want this behavior? They should at least make it possible to opt out of it! As an editor, I have to use the software my clients use, but if I had a choice, I would have long since switched away from Microsoft.

    1. One thing to remember is that the commenting system Microsoft now uses in Word is used elsewhere… For instead, commenting on videos uses the same system. The point here is that the system isn’t designed to just deal with documents.

  8. The sentences Tony Redmond uses in the face of criticisms of the current Track Changes comment style don’t parse – nor do they go to the heart of the issue.

    1. To each their own. I use modern comments every day and I don’t find many problems. Like any other feature, it just takes time to become used to the way software works.

  9. I work in English and Spanish, and, with modern comments, when I type in English it recognizes typos, but when you click the red line it gives you Spanish suggestions! So that useful feature doesn’t work. I tried changing all sorts of langauge settings, but the only thing that worked was to revert to classic comments. Also “modern comments must be posted to become visible to other readers of a document.” Why is this an improvement? If you have to use a lot of comments it only adds extra unnecessary clicks. Please leave the choice to users to use the kind of comments they really need.

  10. “Modern Comments” are absolutely AWFUL. MSWord was bad enough to begin with, now it is a nightmare. Way to go Microsoft: take a bad product, and make it worse.

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