When an ongoing dialog of comments and replies is attempted, the previous replies are lost when sending from 2013 to 2003. When the recipient replies to me, only his most recent comment appears in the balloon. He is unable to see my previous reply and the thread of the dialog is lost.

This is a very serious problem in my work as a book editor. None of my clients have Word 2013. Some have 2007 to 2010, but MANY have 1997-2003.

Creating a "reply comment" to an existing comment isn't supported in Word 2003. You will have do to this some other way in Word 2003.

For example, fake it by adding a comment immediately below the one you are "replying" to.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

There are two ways to reply within a balloon:
1) Click on the little square in the upper right corner of the balloon. Your name and date appear. Clearly this function does not work in 2003.

2) Simply type in the same balloon below the first comment. Sadly, this also doesn't work in 2003, which is pretty odd.

second idea might work for short documents with a few comments. It won't work for my long documents (often 50 to 200 pages) with extensive dialog in the margins. An editorial query might be followed by 5 or 6 replies. The margins would be unreadable.

Am I the only person who finds this state of affairs unacceptable? I purchased Word 2013 as an editorial tool. Editors communicate with authors via the Track Changes balloons. There is no way I can require my clients to "upgrade" (HA!) to Word 2013 so that the comment balloons are usable.

I found this at http://www.word-2013-tutorials.com/tag/compatibility/ regarding 2003-201 compatibility of comments:

"Comment replies become top-level individual comments, and all comments marked as “done” will appear as regular comments. If the comments are not changed, the original state will be restored when the document is upgraded in Word 2013."

That's not what my problem is. My problem is that the previous replies disappear completely from the balloon. I haven't marked any comments "done."

Speculation, but would one possible workaround be to stop using the balloon comment mechanism – since this doesn't let you work with files in different versions – and use styles instead: one style for "input from editor" and a second style for "reply from author". Use the customised ToC options to round up just the comments; use search/replace to remove all the comment threads from a finished document, or even update the styles to "hidden" to maintain an archive.

Thank you, but that complicated workaround only highlights the unworkability of Word 2013. I'm going to uninstall it and replace it as soon as possible.