Changing symbology of annotations

[IlkaIllers1]

When changing the symbology of an annotation, the following warning pops up:

Why is it set so that features will continue to follow the old symbol? Wanting to change the symbol of all these features is precisely the reason I am changing to a new symbology! Why else would I change it if I want to keep the old symbology? It doesn't even make sense! Else I could just add a new annotation class with a new symbol!

This means I have to use the field calculator to recalculate the SymbolID field, which last time first caused ArcGIS Pro to crash, and then the leaders were missing.

I would prefer that the symbol I am changing gets to keep the original Symbol ID and AnnotationClassID, so that all the features automatically get the new symbol. That just makes so much more sense if you want to change the symbology of an annotation. 

(This worked much better in ArcMap.)

[JonathanNeal]

This means I have to use the field calculator to recalculate the SymbolID field, which last time first caused ArcGIS Pro to crash, and then the leaders were missing.

@IlkaIllers1 Can you show me an example of what you mean here?  Do you mean the Calculate Field Tool or the label class expression?  (Thanks for bringing this to our attention)

[IlkaIllers1]

I fixed the problem with the crashing and missing leaders, but I still think it is quite unnecessary and avoidable to have to re-calculate the SymbolID.

[WendyHarrison]

@IlkaIllers1 

If you're not looking to make edits to the annotation you should take a look at symbol substitution.

This will change the display of your text without an edit to the underlying feature class.

When you say this worked much better at ArcMap how do you mean?  

[AndrewWallick]

@WendyHarrison @JonathanNeal  We also are hoping to change our default annotation symbol, and I ran into the same warning. I wish that it would let me just make a change, without having to go through and update the attributes of all my existing annotation. Is that the only work around?