Microsoft Word has a function to help users manage their documents

Microsoft is starting to test a new task feature in Word today. The software maker found that many people left notes in their Word documents as placeholders to add more text, images or graphics. Microsoft now gives much more power to these notes with a function to do that allows you to know automatically when you left these little notes for yourself or for others.

Word has been commenting for years, but this new task feature will automatically find where you may have written "todo:" or "<>" in a document and will collate these instances as suggestions. Word will then provide a list of these elements and you can use them individually or even with @ -mention colleagues to tell them to add content to a shared Word document.

The notification will trigger the sending of an email to a colleague, but you can actually act on the document and notification by responding to that email. For example, if a colleague has requested that an image be added to a document and marked on it, you can simply reply to the email with the image and it will be inserted into the document.

Microsoft uses Machine Learning to discover these notes in documents. Over time, even phrases like "<>" will be detected and Word will suggest recent documents to add content. You do not even have to open this document to see the graph; a sidebar will simply highlight the graphics in these documents so you can insert them quickly.

This is a clever new feature that will definitely speed up collaborative work in Word, especially since e-mail notification can be used to insert content into documents. This makes Word more collaborative and similar to Google's approach with Docs, which allows you to tag multiple people in a document. (Google Docs does not have automatic task suggestions, though.)

Surprisingly, Microsoft is making this solution available to Office for Mac testers today, with a Windows version ready to be tested in the coming weeks. Once the tests are complete, they will be widely deployed to existing Office 365 customers. Microsoft also plans to soon integrate this solution with other Office applications, based on feedback from testers.