Redesigned Word Comments VBA deprecation announcement

Office Add-ins team

Last year, we announced the Redesigned Comments in Word as an effort to bring consistency to the reviewing experience and facilitate collaboration across apps and platforms. With the new redesigned comments user experience announcement, we want to point out there are four VBA scenarios that are no longer fully supported in Word Comments.

What is changing in Word Comments?

The following VBA Selection scenarios and VBA commands will have different behavior in the redesigned comments experience:

    • Using VBA Selection commands like Selection.BoldRun command on user selection with Comments no longer applies bold formatting on user-selected text on user-selected text or Selection.TypeText command on user selection with Comments no longer inserts text.
    • The DeleteAllCommentsShown method deletes the visible subset of comments. This includes active comments (shown) as well as resolved comments (indicated by comment hint).
    • The Options.CommentsColor property is still available but there will be no visible effect in the Redesigned Comments experience. However, the command will apply the CommentsColor property to the Word options so if the current user reverts to the previous commenting experience, the comment thread outline color will change based on the previous setting.
    • The Comment.Done property is still available, but when setting the Done flag for a single comment reply, there will be no visible effect in the Redesigned Comments experience. The command will apply the Done flag, so when a user opens the document in the previous commenting experience, the comment reply is displayed as resolved or unresolved.
    • The Application.CommandBars property has changed. CommandBars(“Comments”) cannot be used to customize the context menu for comments

When is this happening?

The Redesigned Comments in Word feature will be available in Word for Windows for both Beta and Current Channel (Preview) users on Version 2007 (Build 16.0.13029.20006) or later.

What do I need to do to prepare for this change?

If you are using macros to manipulate user-selected text in a comment, you should transition those macros to using the Comment.Range object to manipulate comment text.

We’d love to hear from you!

If you have any feedback or suggestions, you can submit them within Word by clicking the Help Improve Office smile button in the top right corner, or on the menu click Help > Feedback. We’re excited to hear from you!

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