Microsoft is starting to test a new to-do feature in Word today. The software maker found that a lot of people leave notes in their Word documents as placeholders to add more text, images, or charts. Microsoft is now making these notes a lot more powerful with a to-do feature that automatically tracks when you’ve left these little notes for yourself or others.
Word has had comments for years, but this new to-do feature will automatically find where you may have written “todo:” or “<<insert something here>>” in a document, and it will collate these instances as suggestions. Word will then provide a list of these items, and you can use them individually or even @-mention colleagues to notify them to add content into a shared Word document.
The notification will trigger an email to a colleague, but you can actually take action on the document and notification by replying to that email. For example, if a colleague has asked for an image to be added to a document and tagged you in it, you can simply reply to the email with the image and it will be inserted into the document.