
Instead, commented-on text is shaded in gray until a specific comment is either in progress or hovered over or selected then the shading turns purple (as in the screenshot above). Notice that there’s no line connecting a modern comment to the text. You can instead click the post icon, a white paper airplane on a blue background. Word alerts us to this step by including a tip in every new comment: “Press Ctrl+Enter to post” (Cmd-Enter works on a Mac). †īut in documents that aren’t shared in this way, this requirement is mainly noticeable as an extra step. In a shared document that more than one person is editing at the same time, this feature will prevent others from seeing a comment as you type it-that is, before you think it’s ready. The most obvious thing that makes Word’s modern comments different from its classic comments is that you now need to “post” a comment before you can return to the document. No extra steps required.Īnd let’s say I start to enter a comment only to change my mind. Put your cursor where it needs to be-in the document or in a comment-and start typing or deleting or finding and replacing or whatever. Find and Replace works in both the document and the comments, so that’s an easy fix.Īnd that’s the key to Word’s classic comments: There’s little difference between text in the comments and text in the document itself. For example, say I notice that each time I refer to an author named Smyth, I’ve typed “Smith” by mistake. On documents with lots of comments, I’ll sometimes use Find and Replace.

To go back and edit that comment (or any other comment in the document), I can simply click into it and start typing.Ĭlassic comments can also be replied to or resolved (after which they turn gray), options that appear when you hover over or click into an existing comment:.Clicking back into the document also works. To get back into the document, I hit the Esc key.
#Microsoft word for mac review windows

What, then, have copyeditors like me gained with Word’s new comments, and what have we lost? Word’s “Classic” Comments That includes the comments we use to document our changes and query any loose ends. Ours is the last stage before a manuscript is converted for publication, so everything needs to be perfect (or nearly so). We aren’t looking for feedback, not until we’re ready for it. Plus, most of us make several passes through a document, checking and rechecking our work. Our documents may live in the cloud (on Dropbox or some other file-hosting service), and we do send them back to the author or publisher when we’re done with them (usually via email), but they’re not shared-not in the real-time, collaborative sense of that word. And there are some real advantages to the new interface.īut Word’s new comments are less easy to get excited about if, like me and most of the other copyeditors I know, you do your main work in isolation.

The opposite of modern is outdated, old-fashioned, antiquated.
#Microsoft word for mac review update
This update sounds like it should be a good one. If you use Word, and unless you have your updates turned off, there’s a good chance you have them by now, or will soon. Over the last year and a half (beginning in April 2021), Microsoft has been rolling out its “modern comments” to Word 365 users on both Windows and Mac platforms.
