Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! I’m Aleina Wachtel, a Product Manager on the Word team working on collaboration features. I am thrilled to announce that you can now “Like” comments in Word for Windows.
React to comments in Word for Windows
The modern comment experience in Word sets the stage for richer collaboration by your team and aligns the commenting experience across the Office suite. With modern comments, you can leave thoughts or questions in the document for others, review and edit your comments before committing them, and @mention someone to invite them into the conversation.
Previously, you would find yourself typing replies like “+1” to convey agreement. Now you can simply click a button to “upvote” a response, agree with a sentiment, or acknowledge that you’ve read a collaborator’s feedback. We heard from many of you that you wanted to be able to quickly and easily convey your reaction to a comment like you can do on Word for the web, Teams, or other social media apps. We’re happy to deliver!
How it works
1. Open a document that already contains comments or create a new comment and post it.
2. To react to a comment, click the Like button in the top right corner of the comment box.
3. To remove your reaction, simply click the Like button again.
4. To see who has reacted to a comment, hover over the Like button.
Tips and tricks
- Some comments may not have a Like button. For example, if the document is in read-only mode, or if you are in the middle of drafting another comment, the Like button may not be visible.
- However, if a comment can be liked, the first comment in a thread will always have a Like button visible. When you have reacted to a comment, the Like button will change color.
- When you or another person react to a comment, a number indicating how many users have liked the comment will appear beside the Like button. For replies to the root comment, you need to click to expand the thread, then hover over the specific reply to see the Like button.
- When you hover over the Like button for a comment that has existing likes, a list of names will appear, showing who has liked the comment so far. This list will update in real time while collaborating on your document.
- To react to a comment without using your mouse, navigate to the text in the document with an associated comment and press Alt+F12. From there, press the Tab key to select the Like button. You can press Enter or Spacebar to click the Like button, and then press the Alt+Down arrow keys to expand the user list. Move through the list using the Up and Down arrow keys. The Esc or Alt keys can be used to dismiss the list.
- To react to a comment below the top comment in a thread, press the Down arrow key to move through the list of comment replies until you get to the desired comment, then repeat the steps above to “like” that particular reply.
Known issues
- Collaborators on other platforms (iOS and Android) will not be able to see the comment reactions.
- There may be cases in which comment reactions are not available when editing older documents. In these cases, the comments will not have a Like button. However, you can add a new comment in the document and use the Like button functionality in that comment.
Availability
The Like button is currently available to all Word for the web users and Beta Channel users, and is now rolling out to Current Channel (Preview) users running Version 2305 (Build 16501.20152) or later.
The feature will also be available in Word for Mac in the next few weeks.
Feedback
We want to hear from you! Please submit your comments and feedback by selecting Help > Feedback.