[Word] Feedback on Annotations

[TinoDidriksen]

The Word Annotations API is almost usable, but so far there are two rather fatal flaws.

1) Microsoft 365 requirement

As detailed in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/word/word-add-ins-troubleshooting#annotations-dont-work the feature requires the user to have an active Microsoft 365 subscription. This makes the whole feature mostly useless. Large customers, such as companies, schools, and government offices, are all on perpetual licenses. Only individuals are on M365.

2) Resource IDs

Word.CritiquePopupOptions requires Resource IDs for the presented texts. That simply doesn't scale. We have 1281 error types spread across several languages, each with a distinct title and body. And we want to be able to add/remove/adjust these types without needing to go through add-in validation every time, just like we can adjust almost everything else without validation.

And, some explanations are dynamic, using the target word or context. Any API taking Resource IDs must have an overload that takes a simple string instead.

(Ideally, they should also be rich text capable. We show rather long explanations with colors, examples in italics, and links to official language body documentation. Thanks to the fired events, we can continue to show this in the sidebar, but would be best if it can all be in-situ.)

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See also https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/idea/microsoft365developerplatform/proofing-tool-api-spelling-grammar-punctuation-hyphenation/3052575 (originally from August 2020).

The docs say to submit feedback at https://learn.microsoft.com/answers/tags/321/office-development but that site is only for asking questions, so it doesn't feel natural to use it for feedback.