If you’ve ever wished to express your thankfulness for a comment made in a document you worked on in Microsoft Word online, you can now. Microsoft has announced that this capability will be available soon.

This system removes the need to hit the “+1” key to show agreement with a comment in Word on the web. This has been replaced by an upvote button, which is similar to the “like” function in Teams.

To use it, open a document with comments already in it. With the like button in the top right corner of the comment box, you can either react to an existing comment or add a new one. A like can be removed entirely by hitting the like button one more. Hovering over the like button, as you might think, will display you who else has “liked” that comment in real-time.

Sadly, anyone using Word on Windows, Mac, iOS, or Android will not view comment reactions at this time. According to Microsoft, the product team is working on bringing this feature to other platforms as soon as possible. The feature is currently being rolled out on Word online, and it should be available soon.

How it works

1. Open a document that already contains comments, and either react to an existing comment or add a new one.

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.

Tips and tricks

• The root comment in a thread will have an empty Like button visible, which will change color and show a number indicating how many users have liked the comment. For replies to the root comment, you need to click to expand the thread, then hover over the specific reply to see the empty Like.
• When you hover over the Like button for a comment that has existing likes, a list of usernames will appear, showing who has liked the comment so far. This list will update in real-time while collaborating on your document in Word for the web.
• To react to comment without using your mouse, press Alt+F12 to navigate to the comment thread, and then press the Tab key to select the Like. You can press Enter or Spacebar to click the Like button, and the Alt+Down arrow key to expand the user list, allowing you to move through the list using the Up and Down arrow keys.
• To “like” comment below the top comment in a thread, press the Down arrow 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.

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