Enhance collaboration in Word, Excel and PowerPoint with smart @mention suggestions

Power collaboration with @mentions in comments

In today's boundaryless world, collaboration is the key component to the success of an organization. Information workers have a lot of data to process and getting users' attention where their feedback is needed is important. Taking feedback and collaborating on documents is an everyday activity. Our goal is to provide our users with a blazingly fast, low-touch experience, so they can quickly tag the most relevant person in the context of the document. We have understood your problem and introduced a new way of @mentioning in the comments of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents to tag your partners and coworkers. 

You asked, we delivered

We heard from many of you that @mentions could be better. We have reimagined the people picking experience to make it intelligent, smooth, low-touch and with contextually relevant suggestions. The Suggested People list is personally curated based on your communication patterns and context.  

Key improvements we have introduced are:   

• Photos in picker tiles for easy identification
• Suggestion list before the user types – Zero Query  
• Blazing fast suggestions results
• Search, pick, and tag using name, email ID or alias
• Microsoft Accessibility Standard (MAS)-complaint picker
• Accurate, fresh, and comprehensive results  

Experience the new People Picker 

The new People Picker experience is available when you at @mention in the desktop, web or Android versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You can also experience it when collaborating on a document, spreadsheet, or presentation in Microsoft Teams. To experience the new People Picker, follow these steps: 

1. Add a comment from the context menu when you right-click in the body of the document (shown in the image below). Or, from the app's toolbar on the top, go to the Review tab and select New Comment.
   
   An image of a screenshot demonstrating how to create a new comment.
2. In the comment box, type "@" and a drop-down will appear for you to pick and tag people relevant to you. If the desired person is not on the list, you can start typing that person's name, email, or alias to refine the results. You can also assign a task to a tagged person.
   Note: If a tagged person doesn't have permission to view the document, you'll have to grant the permission.
   
   An animated image demonstrating how to @mention a person in your organization within a comment.
3. Once you've @mentioned someone, you can choose to keep their full name or just their first name.
4. To @mention more people, type "@" again and continue the same steps above to tag more people.  

@mention notifications

When you @mention someone or vice versa in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, an email notification will be sent to the tagged person containing a link that takes them directly to the comment in the document. A preview of the comment thread and document text is provided in the email (also known as context preview). 

An image of a screenshot demonstrating the email notification users receive when someone @mentions them in a document.

We are listening!

Our goal is to make it easier for you to collaborate with your coworkers by quickly tagging them in the context of the document. With this new update, we hope you will find it easier to tag and collaborate with your colleagues.

Let us know how you feel about these features. If you have any questions, feedback, suggestions, or any issues to report, please let us know in the comment section below, or email us at: [email protected].

Happy @mentioning!

Mohit Yadav

Product Manager

Microsoft 365 Core

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