M365 Changelog: Announcing PowerPoint modern comments for enterprise general availability

MC256459 – Updated June 24, 2021: Based on learnings from Microsoft’s early rings, they made the decision to make additional changes before they proceed with the rollout. Microsoft will deliver a new Message center post once they re-start the rollout. Microsoft thanks you for your patience.

The comments feature in PowerPoint will be updated to the new PowerPoint modern comments experience. Modern comments help improve your collaborative experience with features such as resolving comments, anchoring comments to objects and text, improved @mentions, and more.

PowerPoint modern comments are available today behind a tenant admin setting which is off by default. This update will change the default setting from off to on.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 82731

When this will happen

• Microsoft will communicate via Message center when they are ready to proceed.

How this will affect your organization

With this update, end users who use the PowerPoint comments feature will see an updated comments experience. The new modern comments experience will affect files where the first comment was added after your organization has the tenant admin setting enabled. Existing files with comments will not be affected

Modern comments can’t be read by PowerPoint 2019 or older, including subscription and perpetual versions. End users will be notified about unsupported comments in their presentations, with a prompt to open the file in PowerPoint for the web to review the modern comments. A full breakdown of experience by PowerPoint version is available in the tenant admin documentation.

The new commenting experience answers several popular feature requests and significantly improves collaboration.

• A comment will now anchor to objects. If you move the object, the comment goes with it.
• Comments can now be anchored to text. This feature will be rolling out to Production Windows and Mac builds in Summer 2021. Users on web and Insiders builds may have this feature earlier.
• Comments in the margins on web. Comments will appear to the right of your slides by default on web, keeping your comments closer to your content.
• You can now mark threads of comments as resolved. Resolved comments don’t appear in the margin but can still be seen in the Comments Pane.
• Modern comments can only be edited by the person who created them.
• Improved notification emails let recipients see the context of the comment and reply directly from the email.

Anchoring comments with text

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What you need to do to prepare

The following steps are recommended to prepare for this change:

• Read over the tenant admin and end user-facing documentation to understand all expected changes.
• Understand the experience on different versions of PowerPoint via the table provided in the tenant admin documentation. Determine if this experience is suitable for the needs of your organization.
• This update will roll out to end users according to their channel. This means different users in your organization may be on different comment experiences until rollout is complete across all channels. If you’d like your tenant to turn on modern comments all at once, please enable the feature via OCPS or group policy.
• If you’ve already explicitly set the PowerPoint modern comments tenant admin setting, that state will be respected. If you do not wish to receive this update, please make sure this feature is set to off in your tenant admin settings. If you decide to disable the feature, Microsoft would love to understand more about why. You can send us feedback at [email protected].